AFFINITY launches Media+, targeting billions in wasted ad spend

Up to $7.8 billion in Australian advertising investment may be delivering little real-world impact each year, according to new analysis from independent agency AFFINITY. With total ad spend sitting at around $25 billion annually, the agency estimates 20% to 30% of budgets are being lost to inefficiencies across planning, measurement, data and organisational processes. 

Against that backdrop, AFFINITY has launched Media+, a diagnostic platform designed to help brands identify underperforming areas of their media mix and redirect that investment toward growth. The two-part product combines a free Media Waste Calculator with a paid diagnostic that delivers a detailed assessment within days or weeks, depending on media scale. 

Angela Smith, CEO of AFFINITY, said the problem facing marketers is far bigger than inefficient targeting or low-attention environments. The problem, she said, is structural and deeply embedded in how the industry operates. 

“Until we fix media waste, measurement waste, signal waste and organisational waste together, we’ll keep paying for results that look good in dashboards but do nothing in the real world,” Smith told Marketing-Interactive. 

Smith said waste has become “baked” into the modern media system, pointing to fragmented channel strategies, weak signals, measurement frameworks that reward activity over impact, and short-term reporting cycles that push marketers into optimising for efficiency metrics at the expense of long-term business growth. 

“Waste today isn’t just about poor targeting or low attention, it’s become structural. It’s baked into how media is bought, measured and managed,” she said. 

While AFFINITY’s campaign language leans into a “war on media waste”, Smith emphasised the real issue is systemic incentives. She cited examples such as over-niched audience targeting, excessive frequency, principle-based buying, invalid traffic, broken pixels, disconnected attribution models and what she called “metric vomit” of dashboards overloaded with data points that have no causal link to revenue. 

ROAS, in particular, is creating unintended consequences. 

“ROAS has become a cancer - it’s an efficiency metric masquerading as effectiveness, and one of the fastest ways to quietly shrink profit,” she said. 

The Media Waste Calculator, the entry point to Media+, gives marketers a directional estimate of how much of their spend may be underperforming. It’s built on a proprietary algorithm incorporating research from System1, Amplified Intelligence, Next&Co and OneDay, along with AFFINITY’s own effectiveness data. The paid diagnostic then pinpoints specific inefficiencies and provides recommended reallocations.

Smith said the intent isn’t cost-cutting for its own sake, but shifting investment into channels and creative that deliver incremental impact.

“In a recent review we identified over $1.5 million waste in search alone created by the way campaigns had been set up,” she said. “The difference could then be utilised to invest in above-the-line media to drive brand growth.”

Smith rejects the idea that Australia’s sophistication as a digital market should have solved this issue already. Instead, she argues the industry has been repeatedly distracted by technologies or frameworks positioned as magic bullets.

“We’re an industry defined by short attention spans and the appeal of novelty, especially when anything is dressed up as a magic bullet,” she said. “The siren song of ‘efficiency’ means the foundations for sustainable growth have increasingly become collateral damage.”

AI and MMM - two areas attracting significant investment - are not immune.

“Enough has been written about the potential of AI, but is a reckoning coming as the hype starts to fall short of reality?” she said. “And MMMs are only as strong as the data and strategy beneath them. Without clean, considered data, any model is broken before it’s out of the gates.” 

Media+ is aimed at brands investing from around $1 million annually, though AFFINITY says the principles scale to enterprise budgets. Smith expects the tool to appeal to marketers looking to build stronger internal business cases for reallocating spend. 

“Every dollar saved is a dollar that can fuel growth,” she said. “Media+ helps marketers build confidence, evidence and business cases for a more strategic and measurable approach to media investment at scale.”