Why Accountability Beats Efficiency in Media

​If you were to ask a room full of agency leaders what the biggest problem in advertising is today, you might get a dozen different answers. But if you look at the balance sheet of a modern brand, one answer becomes glaringly obvious: they are often paying for two strategies to do one job.

For decades, the industry has operated on a schism. Creative agencies dream up the ideas, and media agencies decide where they live. Even within the major holding companies, where these functions are theoretically housed under one roof, the reality is often very different. Departments fight for credit, incentives are misaligned, and the work – and the client’s budget – suffers for it.

​Dan Gee, the UK managing director of Media Futures Market, believes this era of fragmentation is coming to an end. In fact, he is betting his business on it.

“If you’re the client, you don’t need two strategies,” says Dan. “In an ideal world, you’ve got one set of objectives. You need one strategy to achieve those outcomes. And I think where perhaps things have been going wrong is you’ve had two strategies. You’ve had a creative strategy and a media strategy. And that I don’t think is necessarily particularly helpful.”

Dan’s solution is simple but radical: Recoupling media and creative.

Through Media Futures Market, Dan is quietly arming independent creative agencies with the one thing they have historically lacked: a fully-fledged, high-power media department. By embedding Media Futures Market’s managed service directly into creative shops, he is allowing them to offer a single, unified strategy that holding companies struggle to match. And it is working. By the end of 2025, Media Futures Market was powering the media operations of 12 creative agencies in the UK alone.

An Unorthodox Path to Media Leadership

To understand why Dan sees the world this way, you have to look at his background. He isn’t your typical media trading floor veteran. He didn’t cut his teeth on a programmatic desk; he started with an English degree and a stint in sales before moving into the not-for-profit sector.

His early career was spent commercialising heritage assets like the Chelsea Flower Show for the Royal Horticultural Society. It was here, dealing with sponsors like M&G Investments, that he learned the art of the “brief behind the brief”.

“My role was to as effectively as possible define the value of that,” Dan recalls. “Nobody’s going to go to the Chelsea Flower Show to be absolutely battered by branding. But if they can see that these organisations are supporting something that they really enjoy... then it really adds value to everyone.”

That ability to translate brand value into commercial opportunity took him to The Guardian – where he led sustainable business initiatives during a progressive era under former Unilever CEO Paul Polman – and later to The Telegraph. But it was at WeTransfer where his philosophy really crystallised. Tasked with launching the file-sharing giant’s ad business in the UK, he grew revenue from £700,000 to nearly £17 million in six years.

Critically, he did it by rejecting the “cheap clicks” model.

“I often had conversations with people where it would be like, ‘Look, if you want to buy lots of clicks really cheaply... I know a guy at Facebook,’” Dan jokes. “‘We can put you in touch and you can do that through them. If you want to change the way in which people think and feel about your brand, then maybe we should carry on talking.’”

This resistance to the “Big Tech Kool-Aid” forms the backbone of Media Futures Market today.

The Profit in the ‘Messy Rest’

To understand why Media Futures Market’s model is gaining traction, you have to look at where the money has gone over the last 15 years. The industry has drifted en masse toward ‘big tech’ – platforms like Meta and Google – not necessarily because they are the most effective, but because they are the easiest. 

“Part of the reason why Google and Meta have been so successful is because they have done a really, really good job of removing the friction from buying,” explains Dan. “It’s quite easy for small and medium-sized enterprises in particular to tap into Ads Manager and set up a campaign.”

But ease of purchase does not always equal effectiveness. While the platforms offer frictionless transactions, they have also commoditised media buying, turning it into a race for the cheapest click. Dan argues that this "efficiency trap" has blinded the industry to the immense value hidden in what he calls “the messy rest” – the 40% of global ad spend that still goes to trusted, accountable media like TV, publishing, radio, and out of home.

Buying this media is hard work. It requires negotiation, relationships, and manual handling of assets. It is messy. But that friction is exactly where the value hides.

“The initial principle behind Media Futures Market was, ‘We can remove friction from the messy rest,’” says Dan.

Initially launched in the Netherlands as a platform to make buying quality media easier, Media Futures Market pivoted under Dan’s leadership. They realised that clients didn't just want a platform; they wanted a hand to hold – someone to handle the complexity for them.

“In-house they would have defaulted to working with a tech partner to consolidate everything together,” says Dan, referring to a recent international VOD activation for a client. “We will do that groundwork. We will speak to all of the different vendors and the broadcasters directly. And we ended up lowering by about four times the effective CPM that we were able to drive for them.”

By acting as a managed service that handles this complexity, Media Futures Market allows its partners to access premium inventory without the headache, driving massive efficiency gains without sacrificing quality.

Accountability Beats Efficiency

Dan is deeply uncomfortable with the way money has flooded into non-accountable environments. He believes that efficiency (cheap reach) has largely hit a ceiling, and that effectiveness (sales uplift) is the new battleground.

“I’m deeply uncomfortable with the way a big chunk of change has flooded towards non-accountable media,” he says, “to the way in which the platforms can publish stuff that’s not accountable in the same way that publishers and broadcasters have to be.”

His pitch to clients is backed by hard data that proves “accountable media” delivers better commercial results. Media Futures Market recently worked with a second-hand car supermarket that had turned off press advertising for seven years, convinced it was a dying medium. Media Futures Market persuaded it to switch it back on as part of a proper media mix.

The result? “They’ve seen somewhere between 16% and 22% increase in sales for those areas where this plan was activated,” Dan reveals. “Which translates to about an eight times ROI. Which is monstrous.”

In another case for an FMCG brand, Media Futures Market took a brief to drive a 1% increase in trial. By intelligently integrating retail and social media – rather than treating them as separate silos – it delivered a 2% increase while actually reducing procurement costs.

Empowering the Independents

The rise of Media Futures Market is part of a broader shift in the agency landscape. We are seeing a “consolidation of classic agency models” in some areas, but a “fragmentation” in others. Clients are increasingly looking for agility and genuine partnership – traits that independent creative agencies possess in spades.

However, these independents have historically hit a ceiling when the conversation turns to media buying. They have had to hand that budget over to a separate media agency, breaking the chain of strategy.

By partnering with Media Futures Market, these agencies can now compete with the holding companies on their own turf, retaining the trust and transparency of a creative partner, backed by the buying power of a media specialist.

“We are effectively their one stop shop for instant media capability,” says Dan, “but it comes with a managed service that’s underpinned and powered by the platform rather than the platform having primacy.”

This model allows creative agencies to offer a service that feels seamless to the client. There is no media agency fighting the creative agency for budget. There is just one team, working to one strategy, accountable to one set of business outcomes.

“I think clients like this because they don’t want to pay for two strategies,” Dan notes. “If as a client you’re looking for efficiencies everywhere. And so if you can demonstrate not only is it a better strategy because you’ve got these two key elements working more harmoniously, you’re also paying slightly less for it – I think that that feels like a bit of a no-brainer.”

The Future Is Friction

As we look toward 2026, the pendulum is swinging back. The obsession with frictionless, algorithmic buying has hit a wall of diminishing returns. Brands are realising that “you don’t grow market share without differentiating”, and you can’t differentiate if your entire media plan is running on the same automated architecture as your competitors.

Differentiation requires doing the hard things. It requires negotiating content integrations, finding distinct brand assets, and building relationships with publishers who care about the context in which an ad appears.

For Dan Gee and Media Futures Market, the goal isn't just to build a successful agency – though with billings tripled last year and set to grow by up to 10 times this year, they are certainly doing that. The goal is to rebalance the industry’s investment back toward the media that actually works – the accountable, high-quality environments that build brands and drive sales.

“Whilst our priority as an agency has to be on delivering outcomes for clients,” Dan says, “if we can do that in a way that also rebalances investment towards accountable mediums, that is what we want.”​