Running €10k of media is the same workload as running €10M

Take two Google Ads accounts. The first spends €10,000 a month, the second €10 million. Now look at what it takes to run them.

In both cases: Performance Max campaigns with their asset groups, up to 50 search themes per group, a negative keyword list that can reach 10,000 entries, a Smart Bidding goal (tROAS or tCPA), brand exclusions, conversion tracking to check. The set-up is the same. The optimisation is the same: the machine adjusts bids every hour, whatever the budget. The reporting is the same: same columns, same channels, same API.

What changes is the invoice. A commission on spend multiplies an identical job by a thousand. A time-based retainer grows with the number of meetings, not with the complexity of the account.

And that identical job is already largely automated by the platforms themselves. According to Madison & Wall, 12% of US ad spend now runs through automated or AI campaign types — Performance Max, Advantage+, Smart+ — up from 2% in 2023, and heading to 27% by 2030. In other words, more than a quarter of the US ad market will soon be operated by systems that make no difference between a small account and a large one.

If the machine runs the same for everyone, the only thing that justifies a price is what the machine doesn't do: deciding where the budget goes, what to stop, when to rework the creative. That is what mediagentic bills for — a flat fee, because that doesn't depend on your budget either.