Is Your Creative Budget Going in the Bin?
We threw fake £20 notes into a bin at Creative Ops London this week. The response told us everything.
People laughed. Then they paused. Then they said some version of: “honestly, that’s exactly what it feels like.”
The game was called Wasted Spend. The premise was simple, toss enough £20 notes in the bin, win a prize. But the conversation it started was anything but light. Because for most enterprise marketing teams, wasted creative budget isn’t a joke. It’s a structural problem that’s quietly eating millions, and most teams don’t have the visibility to even know where it’s happening.
The waste is everywhere. It’s just invisible.
Here’s what we kept hearing on the floor at Creative Ops London: “we’re producing more than we’ll ever use, and we have no idea what’s getting used.” And that’s the core issue. The waste isn’t dramatic — it doesn’t show up as a single bad decision or a failed campaign. It accumulates quietly, across four or five different failure points that most teams treat as separate problems.
Assets that get made and never used. Industry estimates put unused creative at anywhere between 50–60% of total output for large enterprises. Content is commissioned, approved, delivered — and then sits dormant in a DAM nobody searches properly, or a shared drive that’s become a digital landfill.
Assets that get made twice. Without a platform to oversee all creative output, regional teams recreate work that’s already been produced. Slightly different brief, slightly different agency, same outcome. No one flags it because no one can see it.
Rights that expire unnoticed. Talent contracts. Music licences. Regional usage restrictions. These aren’t edge cases — they’re recurring costs that hit hardest when they go unmanaged. A campaign running past a talent window or into a restricted territory isn’t just wasteful, it’s a compliance and legal exposure.
Budget behind campaigns with no performance feedback loop. Spend decisions get made on instinct or precedent because the data isn’t connected. Which assets drove results? Which regions are actually activating what’s been produced? Which markets are going off-brand? The answers exist — they’re just fragmented across systems that don’t talk to each other.
The compliance dimension nobody mentions.
Rights violations get most of the press, but there’s a quieter compliance problem sitting underneath it: brands operating across multiple regions without any real visibility into whether those regions are following brand guidelines, using approved assets, or respecting local regulatory requirements.
For global brands especially — across alcohol, financial services, pharma, and anywhere with regional advertising codes — this is an active risk. And the cost isn’t just fines. It’s brand integrity, partner relationships, and the internal overhead of firefighting problems that should have been caught upstream.
The question isn’t whether you’re wasting budget. It’s how much.
Most enterprise marketing leaders we spoke to at Creative Ops London weren’t surprised by any of this. They’ve felt it. The frustration isn’t a lack of awareness — it’s a lack of a joined-up solution. The tools exist in silos. The data exists in silos. And the result is a creative operation that’s spending more than it should, producing more than it uses, and carrying more risk than it knows.
Fixing it starts with visibility: a single view of what exists, what’s been used, what’s still live, what’s at risk. That’s what we’re building at Medialake — and based on the conversations we had this week, it’s exactly what creative ops teams are ready for.
