In most pharma and medtech organizations, marketing media is still bought largely as it always has been, with only limited benchmarking against current market conditions. Bringing structured sourcing discipline to this category has generated savings above 30 percent within months – without compromising agency quality, campaign continuity, or marketing effectiveness.
The value created goes beyond cost reduction: it gives organizations, for the first time, real transparency and control over a spend category that has largely run on its own. Leadership can then decide whether to bank that value as savings, or reinvest it into greater reach and marketing impact.
This Article discusses:
- The scale of marketing media spend in pharma and medtech, and why so much of it escapes scrutiny
- How to build real pricing transparency and competitive tension into a category built on opaque trading models
- The commercial and contractual levers that convert that transparency into durable savings
- How to bring Commercial and Marketing stakeholders along, so sourcing gains never come at the expense of agency quality or campaign delivery
- Why marketing media should be run as a benchmarked, actively managed spend category – and what that means for how Procurement, Commercial, and Marketing work together.
The cost category that pharma and medtech keeps overlooking
Marketing media ranks among the largest cost categories in pharma and medtech, and among the hardest to see into. Organizations that have put real sourcing discipline behind it – benchmarking, structured competition, contractual renegotiation – have found savings in excess of 30 percent inside a few months, with marketing output and campaign delivery unaffected.
Two forces make this the right moment to act. Agency competition for pharma and medtech accounts has intensified, and generative AI is compressing campaign timelines while pushing planning toward real-time, data-driven decisions. Together, they are resetting what media should cost. The only open question is whether Procurement acts on that shift, or continues to price media as if it had not occurred.
Why the status quo persists
Four structural features make media spend unusually resistant to being challenged.
| Structural barrier | Effect on the sourcing outcome |
|---|---|
| Media buying organized by region or brand | Prevents like-for-like pricing comparison and leaves existing scale advantages uncaptured |
| Layered rebates and agency trading models | Obscures the true cost of media, limiting fact-based negotiation |
| Agency relationships that predate current leadership | Ownership for renegotiating them is often not clearly assigned, so they continue on existing terms by default |
| Benchmarking against category averages | Limits ambition to "in line with market" pricing, rather than the top-quartile rates achievable through structured competition |
These barriers are less about media itself than about ownership and cross-functional alignment. Commercial and Marketing are typically the demand owners with decision-making authority over agency relationships, while Procurement holds the sourcing expertise: individual functions carry clear responsibilities, but the full value unlock comes from a holistic, jointly-owned approach. Where that joint ownership is not established, existing arrangements tend to continue by default, and rates are revisited only when a budget cut forces the conversation.
Building real competition into media buying
Many organizations assume their media spend can not be meaningfully benchmarked, largely because it has not yet been tested. In practice, doing so typically comes down to three moves:
-
Consolidate spend before negotiating
Map media buying across brands and geographies so genuine scale becomes visible and negotiable, rather than scattered across dozens of disconnected contracts.
-
Anchor negotiations in performance, not just budget
Bring measurement into the commercial conversation from day one, so pricing discussions reflect what media actually delivers for Marketing’s campaigns and product launches, not simply what was spent last year.
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Expand the competitive set, without lowering the bar
Include agencies beyond the current roster – not only the two or three names Procurement already knows – to surface pricing and capability options that were not previously visible. A rigorous evaluation process ensures the quality bar remains at least as high as the existing roster, so Marketing’s confidence in its partners is preserved throughout.
The levers that convert transparency into results
Increasing agency competition is only the first step. Most of the durable value comes from how the resulting spend is contracted and governed afterward.
Pooling spend across business units so scale translates into pricing leverage, instead of sitting unused across separate budgets.
Comparing actual placement costs across agencies, formats, and markets to find where rates are out of line.
Requiring visibility into how rebates, mark-ups, and trading arrangements actually work, so cost conversations rest on real numbers rather than assumed ones.
Tying budget allocation to measured effectiveness, so spend shifts toward what performs rather than staying where it has always been.
Structuring fees so part of agency pay depends on results delivered, not just the volume of media placed.
Negotiating pricing caps and inflation protection so cost predictability survives beyond the current negotiation cycle.
Building minimum service levels and transition safeguards into agreements, so expanding or changing agencies never puts a live campaign or product launch at risk.
None of these levers depends on switching agencies. Applied together, they turn media into a spend category with a clear price, a clear owner, and a clear path to improvement.
Proof from the field
A pharma company recently put this playbook to work across its global media portfolio. The team pooled spend across business units and brands, then ran a tender reaching more than 20 agencies – a scale of competition the category had never seen.
A category owned across functions
None of this is about constraining Marketing’s ambition. It is about ensuring marketing spend is deployed on terms that are fully understood and actively managed – something that only happens when Procurement, Commercial and Marketing, Legal, and Finance own the category jointly, rather than Procurement negotiating fees on its own. Marketing’s perspective is central throughout: securing the right partners, protecting campaign and launch timelines, and preserving creative and executional quality are not constraints on the sourcing process – they are its success criteria.
For pharma and medtech leadership, the payoff is not a one-time renegotiation. Once a category has been opened up, it stays open: transparent pricing and structured competition compound across every future budget cycle. The real measure is not the size of the media budget, or even the savings achieved – it is whether the organization can now choose where that value goes: toward lower cost, or toward greater reach and marketing impact.
Acknowledgement
Special thanks to Cindy Oswald und Charlotte Engelmann for their valuable contribution to the development of this article.
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