This is a prime example of how an ad agency’s primary objective, and success for the client, are very rarely in alignment

Back in 2015, I was a Supervisor for the department of Omnicom called resolution media. One of my biggest accounts with CBS, when we would have a seven figure budget on some days across multiple shows running concurrently. The majority of the objective here was to get share of voice and frequency in our target audience, as well as understand who responded most positively and negatively to the advertising. We’d spend this much money to not only make sure the people were excited about the show, but also to get intelligence on who would we be able to sell commercial air time to during the show by market.  So we would make contracts, forecasting how much money it would take to reach 70 or 80% of Americans several times over one or two day period. We would use the reach and frequency Campaign to give us a projection on what our cost would be. Generally people would then just set up the region Frequency campaign, which took about 10 minutes, spend $1 million, and then bill 10% to 20% commission on the spend and spend a week writing a report.  Now if you’re reading between the lines, you’re seeing that it might cost $100k-$200k to do basically 15 minutes work, and then spend a week writing reports fancy enough to make the person hired you look good to their boss.  So, where is the problem on what I did that got me fired?  Well let me tell you...  After raising the account from 50,000 a month doing sweeps week in the fall the year prior, to seven-figure budgets, my employers were extremely happy with my performance. But I made a critical error promoting several shows before the fall launch.  Remember how this deal is constructed, it’s a percentage of ad spend, on a seven-figure budget, to produce a report, that makes the person that hired you look good to the boss. That is what the job actually entails.  Now, I’m a performance marketer, I have made the mistake of putting the clients needs as a priority, and caring about the net result at the end, as well as personally being motivated to do a better and better job. Now I had already done this Work for 1520 minutes and build a couple hundred thousand dollars over and over and over again, making a couple million in commission from my employer, wear for the record I was also making less than $100,000 a year.  So, I went in and was able to overdeliver on the share of voice, scoped at 70%, but I delivered over an 85%, and the frequency scoped at 2 1/2, or I delivered a four, and Beat the projected cost by 20%. This means that we had said we were going to reach 70% of Americans 2 1/2 times for a $5 CPM at a cost of $1 million. I reached 85% of Americans four times for a CPM of $4. At this point, Facebook would not let us spend anymore during this period of time, because we had maxed out the available inventory.  I did this by running a manual bid on CPMs across a couple campaigns set up for reach, impressions, Video views and engagements. The Reach and Frequency campaign was merely a reach campaign set to a target frequency.  So why was I in trouble, why was over delivering on impressions, over delivering on frequency, and over delivering on reach, to the point where Facebook literally could not spend another penny… A bad thing.  I got in trouble, because I cost the agency $40,000 in commission and also set a standard of expectation for future campaigns that reduce the allowable budget for more million dollar efforts from the client.  Because I did a good job, I had a short term cost in commission sales, and reduce the scope of previous work, even if that meant for more future work.