How to tell when your maritime paid media agency is overcharging

Maritime is a small, specialist sector where most paid-media agencies do not have meaningful experience. The ones who do, charge a premium that is usually justified by the depth of the work. The generalists charge similar fees on the basis that paid media is paid media, and the work that gets done usually does not earn its keep.

This is a guide to telling, from the outside, whether your agency is delivering value or coasting.

Sign 1: management fees disconnected from work performed

Most agency contracts charge either a flat retainer or a percentage of media spend. Both are reasonable structures. What is not reasonable is when the fee structure produces a number that bears no relationship to the work actually being done.

Flag for review:

• Retainer above £4,000 per month with fewer than two scheduled meetings per month
• Percentage-of-spend fees above 15% on accounts with media budgets above £20,000 per month
• Combined retainer plus percentage fees (some agencies charge both)
• Setup fees billed separately every time a new campaign is launched, on top of the retainer

A useful question to ask: if you tracked the hours spent on your account by everyone at the agency last month, what hourly rate would the fee work out to? The honest range for senior maritime paid-media specialists is £80 to £160 per hour. If the implied rate is materially higher, ask why.

Sign 2: the same campaign structure for two years

Maritime sales motion changes. The fleet you are targeting today is not the fleet you were targeting two years ago; new tonnage has joined the market, environmental regulations have shifted and competitor activity has evolved. A paid-media account that has not had a structural rebuild in 18 months is almost certainly out of date.

Ask:

• When was the last time campaign structure was meaningfully reviewed?
• How has the keyword list changed over the last twelve months?
• Which audiences have been added or retired in the last two quarters?
• What new platforms or formats have been tested in the last six months?

If the answers are vague, the account is on autopilot.

Sign 3: surface-metric reporting that hides pipeline truth

If the monthly report focuses on impressions, click-through rates, conversion rates and brand-awareness scores but cannot tie the spend to actual pipeline created, the agency is reporting on what makes them look good rather than on what matters.

Ask for:

• Cost per qualified lead by channel
• Cost per opportunity by channel
• Pipeline value attributed to paid-media touchpoints
• Closed-won revenue with appropriate lag

Agencies that have not built this reporting either cannot, in which case the integration work is overdue, or will not, in which case the conversation about value is going to be uncomfortable.

Sign 4: the same creative for nine months

Ad creative, landing pages and offers should refresh on a meaningful cadence. For sponsored content on LinkedIn, every six to eight weeks. For search ad copy, every three to four months at minimum. For display and YouTube creative, every quarter.

If your campaigns have been running the same headlines, the same imagery and the same calls to action for nine months, two things have happened: creative fatigue is suppressing performance and the agency is not investing time in refreshing the assets despite invoicing as if they were.

Sign 5: opaque media spend

A reasonable contract gives you direct access to the ad-platform accounts (Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Microsoft Ads). If your agency runs media on accounts they own and only reports back through dashboards they control, that is a structural problem.

Specifically check:

• Are the ad accounts in your name and your billing arrangement, or in the agency’s?
• Do you have administrator-level access to the platforms, not just reporting access?
• Can you see the actual media spend numbers in the platform, alongside what is invoiced?

Agencies who control account ownership have a structural incentive to inflate management fees and to make moving providers difficult. The right setup is platform accounts owned by you, agency users granted access, fully transparent.

Sign 6: no maritime-specific knowledge in the room

The clearest tell is conversational. A maritime-competent paid-media practitioner uses sector vocabulary correctly and instinctively. They know that VLCC is not the same as Suezmax, that DNV and Lloyd’s Register are different organisations, that ship management and ship operating are not synonyms, that scrubbers are not the same as ballast water treatment.

A generalist agency on a maritime account will usually betray itself within fifteen minutes of any technical conversation. If your agency strategist needs the basics explained every time, the depth of work being done on your account is correspondingly thin.

What to do about it

A few options, in order of escalation:

• Ask for a value review meeting where the agency presents the work performed, the structural changes made and the pipeline contribution over the last twelve months.
• Request a structural rebuild proposal with a clear scope and a timeline, even if the same agency runs it.
• Take the account ownership home and brief a specialist sector agency to take over the management, keeping the platform history in place.
• Bring the work in-house with a senior hire who has maritime sector experience.

The right answer depends on your in-house capacity and the nature of the underperformance. The wrong answer is to keep paying for what is not working in the hope that next quarter looks different.

The real cost

The cost of an underperforming paid-media agency is rarely the fee you pay them. It is the eighteen months of mediocre pipeline contribution that compounds while you wait for it to come good. Paid media in maritime can be done well. Recognise when it is not and act sooner rather than later.