There are no villains. Only incentives.

A few weeks ago I met a CMO who was furious with his agency.

“They’re hiding margin.”

“They push channels that benefit them.”

“They don’t act in our best interest.”

I asked him a simple question:

“If you were paid the way they are paid, would you behave differently?”

He paused.

That pause is the whole story.

Conflicts are rarely moral.

We like to believe business conflicts are moral. Someone is greedy.

Someone is incompetent. Someone is unethical.

It’s comforting to think that way.

If there’s a villain, the solution is simple: replace them.

But most conflicts in media are not moral. They’re mathematical.

Consider the ecosystem.

The CMO is optimizing for growth, brand impact, and internal credibility. The CFO is optimizing for margin, predictability, and cost control.

Procurement is optimizing for price and compliance.

The agency is optimizing for margin stability, risk management, and pressure from its holding group.

None of these goals are irrational. None of them are evil.

But they are different.

Everyone is responding to their circumstances. Everyone believes they are justified.

The tragedy isn’t moral failure. It’s structural inevitability.

An agency that guarantees prices carries risk. Risk must be priced. Risk must be managed.

A CMO facing quarterly scrutiny wants certainty and performance. A CFO wants cost discipline.

Procurement wants documented savings.

Each decision “suspicious” from one angle often looks “rational” from another. What we call misalignment is often just optimization under different constraints. This is why governance matters more than good intentions.

If a relationship depends on everyone behaving heroically, it is fragile.

Better to design around behaviour than to judge it.

People change. Budgets tighten. Leadership rotates. Pressure increases. Incentives remain.

Wise systems do not judge behavior. They design around it.

Incentive alignment is not about accusing agencies. It is about acknowledging reality.

If compensation rewards volume, volume will grow. If guarantees carry risk, risk will be managed.

If savings are measured on headline prices, negotiation will focus on headline prices.

You don’t need villains for distortion to occur. You only need misaligned incentives.

It is not just about trust.

The most resilient commercial relationships don’t rely on trust alone. They embed alignment into the architecture.

Alignment through: clear risk allocation, transparent compensation logic, performance metrics that reflect real value, and governance that reduces ambiguity.

When incentives converge, behavior follows.

When incentives diverge, no amount of goodwill can fix the tension.

The goal is to design a system where neither side needs to win.

There are no villains in media. Only incentives.

Governance decides whether those incentives collide —or compound.