A courtroom drama involving a global agency giant, a whistleblower, and some eye-watering ad spend figures has just given the marketing world a peek behind the curtain, and my goodness, the numbers are worth talking about! (The Times)
The agency had to disclose client media spend across platforms like Google Search, PPC and YouTube, and this wasn’t just a little bit; we are talking millions.
| Brand | Google/PPC/YouTube Spend (2023) |
| Ford | $299 million |
| Unilever | $194 million |
| Adidas | $101 million |
Pause for a moment… $299 million on paid media in just one single financial year? That number is big enough to spark headlines even without a lawsuit!
But from a marketing and data governance perspective, it should spark two questions that aren’t being asked loudly enough…
1. What happens after the click, and how are you tracking that?
2. With budgets that size going into paid media, what on earth is happening to the data on the other end?
The PPC Trap: Big Numbers, But a Fragile Foundation
PPC gives the impression of control. Yeah, it can be easy to run and report on. But as we’ve explored before in our piece on why CRM and email might be better than PPC, it can be a slippery slope.
Once you start relying on PPC, it becomes almost impossible to break the cycle. If you switch it off, the leads stop; also, if you pause it, your competitors fill the gap. For large brands, huge budgets might make it sustainable, but the principle is the same for everyone: if your pipeline disappears when paid media pauses, you’re on shaky ground, my friend.
The key is making sure every pound spent does more than drive a click. It should feed your CRM, strengthen your first-party data, and build relationships that last long after the campaign ends.
The Numbers Are Big, But The Data Problem Is Bigger
Paid media is extraordinary at generating demand and extraordinarily bad at telling you who you’re actually talking to.
You can reach millions of people. You can optimise your cost-per-click to within an inch of its life. And at the end of the campaign, you might know that a consumer clicked on an ad at 7:43pm on a Tuesday.
We’ve broken down here what you likely don’t know unless you’ve built the infrastructure to capture it:
| What Paid Media Tells You | What CRM Should Tell You |
| Someone clicked your ad | Who that person actually is |
| Cost per click / ROAS | Their purchase history and loyalty |
| Campaign impressions | Whether they’re about to switch brands |
| Platform-level audience segments | What it would take to retain them |
| Traffic to your site | Their lifetime value to your business |
GDPR Isn’t Going Away, and Neither Is the Risk
There’s a governance dimension here that goes beyond marketing efficiency. If you’re running paid campaigns that drive users to landing pages, capture email addresses, or drop cookies, and you haven’t got watertight consent mechanisms, clear data retention policies, and a CRM infrastructure that respects those boundaries, you have a compliance problem, not just a marketing one.
| The Compliance Question | What You Should Be Able to Answer |
| Consent | Can you prove every contact opted in, when, and to what? |
| Data retention | Do you know how long you’re holding data, and is it lawful? |
| Purpose limitation | Are you only using data for what it was collected for? |
| CRM accuracy | Are your records clean, deduplicated, and up to date? |
| Audit trail | If challenged, can you show exactly what happened to someone’s data? |
If any of those answers is “not sure”, then that’s your starting point.
So, What’s the Fix?
Paid media and CRM aren’t competitors. They’re two halves of the same engine.
Paid brings people in. CRM is how you keep them, understand them, and build loyalty that means you’re not constantly re-acquiring the same customers at enormous cost.
The brands getting this right treat CRM as the connective tissue between every touchpoint, the system that makes media spend compound in value over time, rather than evaporate when the campaign ends.
Also, that engine needs data governance as its foundation, not an afterthought. Get the compliance infrastructure right, and your CRM becomes the system that makes every pound of media spend compound in value over time. Get it wrong, and the campaign that filled your database could be the one that empties your legal budget.
If you’re not sure whether your CRM is set up to make the most of your media investment, let’s talk.
Want more insights? Check out:
Holiday CRM Insights for Personalised Marketing
Why WhatsApp Marketing is Powerful – Check out other ways to do marketing
Email Marketing Trends – Check out how to get smarter inboxes
