Paying Commission on Ad Budget

There is a detail buried in many marketing agency contracts that often goes unnoticed, a commission calculated on the amount you invest in ads. The more budget you put into Google or Meta, the more the agency earns, regardless of the return that campaign brings back for your business. It is an old model, common in the market, and worth understanding before signing any contract.

This format was born decades ago, when agencies negotiated space on television and radio, and the commission made more sense in that traditional media context. In the world of digital ads, where every dollar invested can be measured with precision, that same model creates a clear misalignment of interests between whoever is paying and whoever is managing.

The practical problem with this model

If your agency earns more the more you spend, the natural incentive is to suggest budget increases, even when the campaign is not yet optimized enough to justify that increase. It is not necessarily bad faith, it is simply how the payment model itself works, it rewards spend, not efficiency.

In practice, this means businesses end up spending more than they should, without that difference bringing proportional return. And since the agency is paid regardless, there is no real pressure to optimize spend and reduce waste, because reducing spend means reducing the agency's own pay.

The flat fee alternative

A flat fee model for the work, unrelated to the media investment, removes that conflict of interest. Pay depends on the quality of the work delivered, not on the size of your budget, which fully aligns the interests of whoever manages the campaign with yours, the business paying for it.

BSC works exclusively in that format, a flat fee for the work, no commission on the client's ad budget, so the incentive always sits with campaign efficiency, not the size of the spend.