How Marketing Teams Can Pay Three Times for the Same Insight
As CMOs finalize their 2027 budgets, STRATIS asks what their teams already know that could still change where the money goes.
Large advertisers audit their media spend line by line. Fees are benchmarked and a whole industry exists to find wasted impressions. It's harder to audit what the organization already knows. The consumer research sits with the insights team. The test that settled a question two years ago left with the analyst who ran it. The agency's sharpest read is on slide 31. And the budget gets decided on whatever the room can assemble by Thursday.
This planning season, STRATIS Technologies is putting a name to that gap. Wasted intelligence is the knowledge an organization has already paid to produce and then leaves out of the decisions that spend the money. Before 2027 budgets lock, the company is asking chief marketing officers to look for it in the last three major decisions they approved.
The cause is structural. The research belongs to the insights team, the plan to media, the read to the agency. On a marketing org chart, it can be hard to see who owns getting all three into the decision. The person accountable for the result is the CMO.
"Large marketing organizations can pay for the same intelligence three times. Once to produce it, once in the decision made without it and once to produce it again," said Kyle Verge, Founder and CEO of STRATIS Technologies. "That middle cost never shows up as a line in the budget. I've spent more than a decade running PUSH Media and working alongside these teams. They have smart people and good data. What they know still doesn't always make it into the decision in time."
Industry research points the same way. In a 2026 survey of 71 senior marketers and effectiveness leaders, 54 percent said insights arrived too late to inform paid media planning, according to the World Federation of Advertisers and Ebiquity.
Marketing leaders will recognize the pattern. A brand pays for audience research in the spring, and by fall the media team is buying against a different definition of the customer. A creative test is commissioned a second time because nobody can find why the first one was stopped.
Audience conversation turns toward one product in one market. It is flagged, discussed and parked, and by the time anyone returns to it, the quarter's budget is committed. None of it is recorded as waste. All of it has been paid for.
Consider what that last opportunity might look like while the budget is still open. The brand is preparing a national campaign around price. Sales are picking up in one market, and the agency has flagged growing interest there. In interviews the company commissioned last year, buyers in that market kept coming back to how easy the product was to set up. With those findings in the same room, the brand and its agency have a reason to test a different message locally before committing the national spend.
STRATIS was built for that gap. It connects a marketing organization's data across channels, reads it alongside conditions in the wider market and brings in the business knowledge that usually stays outside the analysis. Strategy and research documents, benchmarks and the results of earlier tests can all shape what STRATIS recommends. The team can see the evidence, challenge the reasoning and decide whether to act.
The change shows up in the decisions. A team can chase the opportunity that would otherwise wait, test the assumption nobody had time to challenge and start each budget decision from what the organization has already learned, instead of paying to learn it again. Accountability stays with the people who make the call.
Marketing will keep investing in measurement, and it should. The next advantage belongs to the organizations that use what they already know while the decision is still open. Before the 2027 budget locks, take the last three major budget decisions. What did the organization know before each call? How much of that knowledge made it into the room? Which decision would you change today?
STRATIS is the intelligence platform for your marketing organization. It surfaces opportunities, identifies what needs attention and recommends next steps, informed by your data and business knowledge. Based in Toronto, STRATIS was built with AXL and University of Toronto researchers Daniel Wigdor and Tovi Grossman. See STRATIS in action at stratis.technology/demo.
