How to Know If You’re About to Waste Your Marketing Budget
By Chris Willman · July 2026 · Positioning
The short answer
Marketing waste is almost never a creative or execution failure. It begins in a decision that was never properly made, several steps upstream of the spend. Five questions, asked honestly before the money goes out, will either confirm the spend is a considered bet or catch the weak assumption while it is still cheap to fix.
John Wanamaker worked out the central problem with marketing more than a hundred years ago and nobody has fully solved it since. “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted,” he said. “The trouble is I don’t know which half.” Wanamaker was no amateur. He built one of the first great American department stores, was among the earliest retailers to take advertising seriously and left a legacy that fed into what became Macy’s. He was as good at this as anyone alive at the time and he was still, by his own admission, guessing.
You would think a century of progress might have closed that gap. We now have analytics that update by the second, attribution models, dashboards for the dashboards and something north of fifteen thousand marketing tools to choose between. Yet ask most business owners what their last marketing push actually returned and the answers have barely moved on from Wanamaker. “Hard to say.” “Didn’t seem to do much.” “We do it because everyone does.” The tooling has been transformed. The confidence has not come with it.
That is not because people are careless or slow. It is because the thing that prevents waste is clarity and clarity is far easier to build before you spend than to reconstruct afterwards, staring at a report trying to work out what on earth happened.
I learned this the expensive way. Early in my career, inside a large company with a proper budget behind me, I ran a campaign I was certain would be brilliant. It had the lot. Glossy visuals, sharp lines, a media plan so elaborate it needed a spreadsheet to keep track of the spreadsheets. We put it live with real swagger and what came back was close to silence. As far as I could tell, one friend clicked an ad once and even that may have been a slip of the thumb.
The part that stuck with me was not the flat result. It was the review meeting afterwards, when someone asked what had worked and what had not. I could narrate every decision we had made. I could not explain why any of it had landed or failed, because I had never been clear on what we were trying to achieve, who we were speaking to, or how we would know if it worked. We had been enormously busy. We had not really decided anything.
That is the distinction I have carried ever since. When you have no clear message, no defined audience and no honest way of measuring whether it worked, you are not doing marketing. You are gambling and over enough rounds the house takes its cut.
This matters far more for you than it did for me in that meeting, because of who absorbs the loss. A large company shrugs off a dud campaign. It is a line item, forgotten by the next quarter. When you are a founder or running something lean, a few thousand pounds spent on a guess is not a rounding error. It is money you needed and hours you will not get back.
Most people misread the problem from the start. When a piece of marketing disappoints, the instinct is to blame the nearest visible thing. The ad copy was weak. The agency underdelivered. The channel was wrong. So next time they hire a better agency, rewrite the ad, try a different platform. But the waste rarely begins where the money leaves your account. It begins in a decision that was never properly made, several steps upstream of the spend.
That failed campaign of mine did not fail because the ads were bad. It failed because nobody was clear on who they were for, or what they were meant to make people do, or whether advertising was even the right move for us at that stage. Executing a decision well when the decision itself was never really made is one of the most expensive things in marketing, precisely because it looks so much like progress. There is activity, there are impressions, there is a tidy report at the end and it all feels like momentum right up until you check whether any of it changed the business and find that it did not.
It is also why “spend more carefully” and “hire someone better” so seldom fix anything. They treat the symptom you can see rather than the cause you cannot, which is a choice made on autopilot, or by default, or because a competitor was doing it and you did not fancy being left behind.
None of this means you can make marketing risk-free. You cannot. Anyone promising certainty is selling you something. What you can do is interrogate a decision before you fund it, the way an experienced marketer does almost without thinking, so the money rests on a real choice rather than a hopeful one. It does not take data science or a big budget. It takes a willingness to be honest with yourself for a few minutes, across five questions.
- 1
Who is this actually for?
Not a demographic bracket, not “small businesses” or “people aged twenty-five to forty-five,” but a specific, recognisable person with a problem you could describe out loud. If the answer is fuzzy, that fuzziness does not stay hidden. It shows up later as weak targeting and a limp response that no amount of creative polish can rescue. Much of Wanamaker’s uncertainty came down to not knowing precisely who each half of his spend was reaching. You are no longer forced to work in the dark on that, so do not.
- 2
What do you actually want them to do, and is that a fair next step from where they stand right now?
A lot of budget gets burned asking near-strangers for a commitment they are nowhere near ready to make, which is roughly the marketing equivalent of proposing on a first date. Attention on its own is not the prize. A specific, sensible action is, but only if it fits the relationship you genuinely have with the person rather than the one you wish you had.
- 3
Is now even the right time to spend on this?
This is the question almost everyone skips, often the most important of the lot. You are not ready to put money behind ads while you are still unsure who your ideal customer is, while your website confuses the people who land on it, or while you cannot yet say plainly why someone should choose you over the alternative sitting one search result away. Spending to amplify something unresolved just broadcasts the confusion more widely, at a price. Often the most valuable move available to you is to fix the thing upstream first and spend later, once there is something worth amplifying.
- 4
What do you genuinely know and what are you quietly assuming?
Every marketing decision contains assumptions and there is nothing wrong with that. The point is to know which parts of the plan rest on evidence and which rest on hope, because the more of it that rests on hope, the smaller the bet you should place until you have learned enough to raise it.
- 5
And how will you know if it worked?
Decide that before a penny goes out, not after. If you cannot answer it in advance, you are booking yourself a return trip to my review meeting, describing what you did with no way of saying whether it mattered. Naming your measure of success up front does something else useful, too: it forces you to be specific about what you are really trying to achieve, which sharpens everything else.
If that sounds like a lot to weigh up, given how much marketing there now is to get your head around, the reassuring part is that none of it has changed those five questions. Platforms come and go every week. What you are really deciding has not shifted since Wanamaker’s day. You do not have to master the whole sprawling landscape to make consistently better calls. You just have to slow down at the one moment that matters most, which is the moment before you commit.
Because wasted spend is rarely about recklessness. It is about being busy, feeling the pressure to be seen doing marketing and treating the decision to spend as a formality rather than the most consequential step in the whole thing. The businesses that waste the least are not the ones with the deepest pockets or the cleverest campaigns. They are the ones that get clear before they commit, so that by the time the money leaves the account, the real work is already done.
The review meeting is a terrible place to discover you were guessing. Run those five questions over your next planned spend and you will either come away genuinely confident it is a considered bet, or you will catch the weak assumption while it is still cheap to fix. Wanamaker never had that option. You do.
