Media buyers look for ways to stay ahead of clients’ tariff budget pressures

“Everybody is trying to figure out what the future is going to look like and what the ramifications are of the announcements,” Bill Koenigsberg, CEO of Horizon Media told Digiday.

In response, some media agencies are reconsidering the ways they invest and place media budgets, in particular direct deals with publishers to rein in vendor fees, and accelerating outcome-focused strategies like curation. The tariffs crisis is providing new ammunition for marketers and agencies already exploring those strategies.

“We’re seeing, in general, more movement towards direct deals and curation. My sense is that’s where the market is headed regardless,” said Dept’s svp of creative and media Sam Huston. “There is a trend in the industry to go back towards a more nuanced approach to media planning.”

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Forrester analyst Nikhil Lai also noticed that more media agencies were striking direct deals with publishers and considering curation. “I expect that trend to strengthen as tariff-induced macroeconomic uncertainty heightens scrutiny on media’s efficiency and effectiveness,” he said in an email.

Clients are never opposed to cost-cutting measures. And they’ve been scrutinizing ad tech suppliers and sell-side providers recently, with an eye to reducing vendor fees and increasing their chances of securing the impressions they actually want. But as they consider how best to protect marketing budgets in an unstable economy, they’re even keener than usual to explore “levers” for media efficiency, said Greg MacDonald, CEO of Chelsea Strategies.

“[Prices] either have to come up or the media’s gonna have to be more efficient,” added John Gladysz, head of product at media agency Noble People.

To Jeremy Whitt, vp, executive media director at full-service agency Hanson Dodge, curation will play a key role in securing better pricing. “We’re going to keep looking out and seeing if there’s an opportunity to go more direct,” said Whitt. “We’re gonna get a better deal, right? We’re going to curate our inventory lists even more because we can get better value on higher quality inventory.”

A direct deal can be cheaper, because by going straight to a publisher, media agencies can skip paying to use some of the ad-tech middlemen involved in a normal programmatic transaction. But it comes at a different price, given that it’s time consuming and difficult to scale.

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It’s related to curation — a practice wherein ad tech vendors curate audience and programmatic supply chain data against ad inventory to sell overlooked, but valuable, ad impressions. Though not necessarily cheaper outright, it can drive greater reach for advertisers at a more efficient clip.

Deanna Mulkeen, head of media investment at Wpromote, told Digiday the media agency would look to lean on partnerships with supply-side platforms (SSPs) and ad-tech vendors to drive efficiencies in its media investments through the current economic malaise.

“Our clients expect [that] every dollar that they invest with us, we are getting the maximum results,” said Mulkeen. “That comes down [the] partnership agreements we have in place, how we cut out any middlemen, how we create those efficiencies.”

Brittany Mosley, CEO & co-founder of media consultancy Rosy Finch Method & Co, told Digiday in an email: “The focus is clearly shifting towards transaction cost optimization while maintaining growth trajectories, with a priority on low CPMs and CPPs while maximizing delivery efficiency.”

For the companies directly impacted by tariff increases, such as autos and consumer packaged goods firms, there will be pressure to reduce marketing spend as profit margins are squeezed. A February IAB survey of marketers found over 80% expected to reduce their advertising budgets by between 6-20%, with most expecting reductions to fall in the second and third quarters of the year. 

“If we start to slide into a recession, then marketers are going to have to be very focused on performance,” said Koenigsberg.

Should marketers in the main choose to move budgets to focus on performance channels, that could create new opportunities among upper-funnel channels, such as CTV. An agency prepared to go direct to a Disney or Netflix could pass on significant cost savings, noted Dept’s Huston.

That’s a matter for the coming weeks and months, however. “No one’s making a knee jerk reaction yet,” added Koenigsberg. That’s because nobody in the ad industry knows how long the tariffs will last, how severe their downstream effects might be, and whether last week’s policy package was the last they can expect on this front. 

And acting to cut overall spend too far amid those unknowns risks inhibiting future commercial growth. “The thing about volatility,” noted Forrester analyst Dipanjan Chatterjee, is “it doesn’t stick around for too long.”