Why You Should Worry About Operational Friction & Waste
The Biggest Marketing Waste Isn’t Ads—It’s How You Work
Marketers love chasing growth.
We optimize campaigns, tweak ad targeting, and pour money into analytics tools and novel data sources—constantly searching for a competitive edge.
But with a focus on external execution, one of the biggest drains on marketing budgets isn’t in the ads we run, but in the way we work as groups.
While ad fraud and poor targeting make headlines, operational inefficiencies quietly destroy more value through bureaucratic1 and political nonsense.
Intentional deception feels a lot worse than mindless waste, but to your bottom line there is no difference.
These aren’t minor annoyances—they cripple agility, destroy relationships between teams, and hold companies back from effective marketing.
Stop accepting inefficiency as a cost of doing business—start treating it as the silent killer that it is.
Why Worry About Operational Waste?
The biggest losses happen before a campaign sees the light of day. If you see yourself or your department in this story, you’re likely a victim of operational waste.
For a client2 (call them Company A) campaign speed-to-market was paramount.
They wanted a searchable database of every image ever used. No more wasting time searching for photos or re-shooting the same images.
Everything would be at their fingertips.
I set out to implement a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system for them.
With the entire universe of images tagged and sorted, the client expected campaign speed-to-market to plummet—why wouldn’t it?
Campaigns should be plug-and-play: Pick an audience, pick from existing pictures, press ‘send’.
Campaign creation speeds up if all the parts already there. Right?
That’s how it should have worked. But it didn’t.
We tested the tool with a few smaller departments. We planned to use their results to estimate how much ROI the project would generate.
Despite a technically successful rollout, the tests showed no practically significant improvement.
Why didn’t a new tool solve the problem?
The problem wasn’t the DAM. It was everything else.
Company A was so operationally knotted that no new tool was going to solve their problems.
Here were the 5 key operational inefficiencies that slowed Company A’s marketing team.
Bureaucratic Approval Processes
Bad KPIs and Misaligned Goals
Overlapping Tools and Platform Bloat
Mismanaged Budgets and Inefficient Spending
Unclear Roles, Siloed Teams, and Internal Conflict
And they’re not alone.
Most marketing teams have massive opportunity in fixing hidden waste—not in just dropping bad ad spend, but in changing how they operate.
If you want to move fast, don’t start with buying tools.
Start by building better systems.
Operational Waste Areas
1. Bureaucratic Approval Processes
At Company A, nobody could map the full approval process.
Each team knew only two things:
Who handed them work
Who they passed it to next
Beyond that: Shrugs, frowns, and referrals to other departments.
When a campaign got stuck in approval limbo, no one person could track down the culprit.
And then there was Legal.
Legal’s two-step approval process worked like this:
Step 1: Pre-production approval – Is the concept compliant?
Step 2: Post-production approval – Are the final assets compliant?
If Legal rejected anything in Step 2, marketing had to start over from scratch.
The Fix:
Know your process. My team spun up a new project to map out the entire approval process. Turns out no one realized how bad it was—and no one knew Legal had a double say (except legal)
Track the pipeline. Keep a public record of where every initiative is and who’s plate it’s on.
One and done. Legal should review once. Not twice.
Hard deadlines. If someone doesn’t approve within a set timeframe, the campaign moves forward—but they’re still on the hook as a ‘provisional approval’ in case something goes wrong3
The Result:
A single, cross-team approval tracker helped people remind departments to approve stuck campaigns
More alignment on when (and how) legal should be engaged
Accountability across teams that still wanted to be included (and teams that realized they weren’t adding value often self-selected out)
2. Bad KPIs and Misaligned Goals
The biggest fight at Company A? Defining success.
Every team measured campaigns differently:
Brand marketing cared about awareness, unprompted recall, and engagement.
Performance marketing focused on conversions, ROAS, and CAC.
Creative teams optimized for content volume and winning awards4.
Nobody agreed. So leadership added another approval layer.
The “success metrics” committee met once a month.
If a campaign missed the meeting, it stayed in limbo another 30 days.
Campaigns stalled for weeks over metric debates.
(but at least they were good about pre-defining success metrics!)
The Fix:
Pre-set success metrics. Don’t debate KPIs mid-project—define them before campaigns start.
One marketing scorecard. Everyone should measure success the same way.
Eliminate slow committees. No waiting for a monthly meeting—teams should move at speed or call targeted, one-off meetings.
3. Overlapping Tools and Platform Bloat
Company A had too many tools.
Every department had its own way to store digital assets:
Some teams meticulously organized local folders. [This actually worked]
Others dumped everything into a data lake.
One team built a homegrown asset system—that nobody else used.
Middle managers could buy whatever tools they wanted.
So when the DAM launched?
It added another tool added to the pile.
Instead of a unified asset system, teams kept using their own.
The Fix5:
Change management! No tool can overcome mis-or-dis-use. Make sure you inform and engage your stakeholders through a project
No more shadow IT. New tools must integrate into a single, standardized system. (But IT should also provide SLAs—otherwise external vendors are fair game)
Set tool governance. No more rogue software purchases before teams see what other, similar groups are using
4. Inefficient Spending
Company A had three types of marketing workers:
Internal employees
Consultants (brought in to streamline operations)
Ad agencies (paid to create campaigns)
And guess what? Every group had different incentives.
Consultants (like me) were tasked with cutting waste.
🤮Agencies were paid a percentage of total spend—so they wanted bigger budgets.
Internal employees were rewarded for more campaigns—so they hired agencies constantly.
The Result
Agencies deliberately added friction, additional touchpoints, and campaigns to the process, knowing that increased spend (without regard to ROI) increased their payday.
Budget ballooned without improving performance.
The Fix (Kinda):
[Depending] Performance-based contracts. Agencies should be paid for results, not spend.6
Internal execution first. Only outsource if in-house teams can’t do it.
5. Unclear Roles, Siloed Teams, and Internal Conflict
Nobody at Company A knew who owned what.
Marketing, sales, and product teams overlapped constantly:
Who owned campaign execution7—brand, performance marketing, or creative?
Who decided KPIs—marketing, sales, or execs?
Who maintained data integrations—IT or marketing?
Instead of clarifying ownership, the tribal decisions of each department grew and ossified over time.
Another Integration Consideration
Company A’s IT team had just rolled out Mulesoft, an enterprise integration platform.
New rule: Marketing had to expose all new internal tools as APIs.
Problem: Marketing didn’t have enough developers to do this
No external consultants? No integrations. No new tools
Marketing teams were stuck with their legacy systems
The Fix:
Clear ownership. Every function should have a single, accountable owner. This should be determined as soon as a function is created.8
Tech enablement for marketing. If IT mandates new integrations, IT must provide the resources—IN A TIMELY MANNER!
Conclusion
I’m sure you’ve worked in a company with one or more of these issues—and can attest to how much they slow you down.
Company A didn’t (just) have a technology problem.
It had an operations problem.
No tool can fix:
❌ Approval bottlenecks
❌ Misaligned KPIs
❌ Tool bloat
❌ Badly-managed budgets
❌ Siloed teams
For companies beyond startup size, the answer lies not in spending more. It’s found in removing friction.
Want to move faster?
Fix how you work, not how you buy.
Yes, I do have to look up how to spell this every time
Actually 2 client stories that I’m putting together for the purpose of this post.
Turns out you can really change the dynamic of a team if you hold them accountable for processes they request to be on
To be honest, I have no idea what creative optimized for
This ‘fix’ section does pain me to say. I feel like there’s no easy balance between enforcing standardization and moving quickly. This is the most use-your-judgement section of the post.
TBH I don’t know of a truly effective payment model for agencies that doesn’t shift to cookie-cutter or being taken for a ride. If you have any tips here, let me know.
e.g. actually scheduling and pressing submit on a page
I know this phrasing sounds too general, but an example would be:If the company decides to start buying billboards (tough to track directly, large audience), then they should decide that brand marketing owns the final say, vendor relation, and payment for all billboard-related purchases.