You own the full marketing P&L, and you’re the one who has to explain agency economics to the board without hedging. This is for reading a contract before it locks in bad terms for another three years, getting outside-sourced cover for a call that would look political coming from inside the building, and benchmarking commercial terms against real peers before a renewal — not after one goes wrong.

You own sourcing for the whole agency category, and the mandate has widened past cost-cutting into actually stewarding the relationship. This is for designing a commercial model with real agency expertise behind it, and getting holdco jargon translated into contract language you can actually enforce.

You feel the pain first and most directly, even without full budget authority. This is for building the business case you can carry upward — proof that a regional or single-brand AOR is underperforming what the master agreement promised, or documentation of scope contraction that’s easier to demonstrate with an outside read than to raise internally.

You’re often the first to name the problem and the person who has to operationalize whatever gets recommended — scorecards, SLAs, governance cadences — once someone above you funds the work. If that’s you, the most useful thing you can do here is forward this to whoever holds the budget.