All guarantees hide constraints.

CMOs and their marketing and media teams spend enormous energy negotiating and buying media through their media agencies. Rates, CPMs, discounts, benchmarks, and —procurement's dearest — guaranteed prices.

It feels rational because media is capital-intensive, savings are visible and everybody likes guarantees.

Media agencies do not own prices. Until they do.

Media agencies negotiate, estimate, and forecast prices. But they do not own them. 

When agencies are asked to guarantee media prices, they are effectively asked to underwrite risk they do not control.

So they do what any rational organisation would do; they quantify the risk so they can manage it. Often this risk mitigation and management leads to proprietary media deals; agencies pre-buy media inventories, bundle them and re-sell them at a margin.

This is perfectly rational and responsible. If an agency is contractually required to guarantee prices, it must manage that risk. No serious advertiser should expect otherwise.

Guarantees change behaviour.

But something subtle happens; risk management changes behaviour. Now agencies prioritise risk mitigation and margin generation over campaign optimisation. The guaranteed price becomes the goal. Not effectiveness. Not strategic fit. Not long-term value.

So, while a few cents saved on CPM felt like a win when the contract was signed, millions can be lost in underperforming campaigns.

 Guaranteed price just became a constraint for the marketing and media teams.

 Because once the contract locks in guarantees, the media plan must serve the guarantee. Not necessarily the strategy.

Nobody is being irrational.

This is about understanding incentives.

Contracts shape behaviour. If you guarantee prices, behaviour will optimise guarantee delivery. 

If you design governance around media performance and shared accountability, behaviour will optimise for performance. 

This is why, while media buying matters, media governance matters more.

The architecture of incentives, guarantees, transparency, and flexibility determines whether the advertiser gets the best possible plan at a fair market price, or the least risky plan at a guaranteed price. 

Those can be very different things.

You get what your architecture makes possible.

A solid contractual architecture allows procurement to understand risk and finance to see exposure clearly.

It allows the marketing and media teams to choose effectiveness without hidden trade-offs.

When governance is designed properly, agencies can focus on optimisation instead of risk containment.

And CMOs and media teams can focus on growth targets and innovation.

In media, as in most systems, structure precedes outcome.

You do not get what you negotiate.

You get what your architecture makes possible.