Media Buying Is Broken in 2025: Why Spreadsheets Can't Keep Up—and the Need for SpendOps

The Hidden Cost of Broken Systems: When Creatives Become Data Janitors

Our research at Flyweel reveals a shocking reality. We interviewed marketing teams spending between $20,000 and $2 million monthly on paid media. The findings were staggering:

The voices from our validation calls tell the real story:

We still go to the ads manager and manually update the budgets even though our live dashboard shows daily spend fluctuations," shared one digital agency owner managing $300K monthly. "Every single day, we had to compile reports manually in Google Sheets to ensure we were spending the correct amount. Any delay meant missing out on opportunities.

Another advertiser spending over $1M monthly explained the ROI challenge: "When managing the advertising spend, it's all about scaling while maintaining a good ROI – if you spend more to acquire someone, your return on that spend decreases."

Perhaps most telling was this insight from an e-commerce manager: "I often have to pull money from one channel and allocate it to Ecom because that's where we see the best return. Our budgeting process is inefficient because funds aren't centralised."

But here's the kicker—one SaaS company executive managing $100K monthly spend captured the attribution nightmare perfectly: "So for me now managing the budget it's very much like what's driving value and… how can I prove that internally with our attribution what's driving conversions. We're actually building another attribution model – we've taken three iterations."

We're spending 30, we'll spend 38 grand this month. And definitely 10 grand of it was wasted... I don't mind wasting money if I learn something from it, but I do feel, in search, that we might spend three grand on, like, one campaign. And I'm like, okay, well, it's a bit shit, but, like, why?

— Education sector CEO managing $500K monthly

This isn't just inefficient. It's revenue suicide.

The Data Explosion That Broke Everything

Let's unpack what those stats actually mean. A 230% increase in data volume should theoretically make us 230% smarter about our marketing decisions, right?

Wrong.

Instead, we've created a system where 90% of marketing stacks can't even talk to each other properly. We're generating mountains of data that nobody has time to actually use. It's like having a fire hose of information pointed directly at your face while you're trying to make million-dollar budget decisions.

The issue isn't too much data—it's the completely backwards approach to using it. We're drowning in metrics while starving for insights.

Think about that for a second. We're pulling 230% more data but getting worse results. That's not progress—that's insanity.

Spreadsheet Hell: The Broken System of Work

Today's marketing teams operate on what we jokingly call "SpreadsheetOps." Connector platforms were once hailed as innovative solutions but now they're everything wrong with contemporary marketing reporting. They focus on retrospective data, rigid templates, manual workflows, and fragile integrations that break when you need them most.

As one marketing manager shared on Reddit:

Supermetrics Facebook reporting tool keeps breaking in Google Data Studio. Error is always 'Connector details... There was an error caused by this connector.'

Another user lamented on Reddit:

It's gotten to the point now where Supermetrics is so unreliable that we're ready to pay a little more and jump to a full-service solution.

Sound familiar?

The Three Pillars of Dysfunction

1. The Connector Catastrophe: When Data Dumps Become Data Disasters

Connector platforms promise seamless integration but deliver chaos. They dump raw data into spreadsheets and expect human intelligence to make sense of it all. The result? Hours of manual manipulation, endless reformatting, and data that's already stale by the time you've finished cleaning it.

Users consistently report the same issues:

I connect my account only to get an 'error 404' message. Supermetrics won't even appear now despite us having a paid plan.

When connectors fail, your entire decision-making process grinds to a halt. Real-time, critical decisions become impossible, directly damaging your pipeline and lead-generation strategies.

2. The Template Trap: Forcing Square Pegs into Round Holes

Generic templates force marketers into frameworks that don't match their business reality. One frustrated user shared:

I have 4 main metrics: Spend, Leads, CPL, CTR. Spend and CTR are correct, but Facebook leads and CPL data are consistently wrong.

Another noted:

We're paid search only. Supermetrics dashboards look good initially but our own custom Data Studio setups have proven more accurate and reliable.

Your business isn't generic. You need insights tailored specifically to your sales pipeline, budget management, and lead-generation realities. Instead of clarity, marketers spend hours adapting rigid templates—hours better spent optimizing campaigns or responding to market shifts.

3. The Manual Nightmare: Automation That Isn't

The promise of automation remains completely unfulfilled. Marketers frequently vent their frustrations:

We spend hours manually updating, translating, and reformatting data—it wasn't scalable.

Platforms drop data directly into Excel or Google Sheets, leaving teams to manually consolidate and interpret everything. This tedious process wastes valuable hours, increases errors, and directly kills strategic execution.

Why Lead Gen and Media Buying Teams Are Getting Crushed

Lead-generation and sales pipeline-driven businesses thrive on rapid decisions and agile budget shifts. Yet traditional reporting is anything but agile. When your most talented marketers are stuck in spreadsheet purgatory, several catastrophic things happen:

Creative Genius Gets Buried: Your best campaign creators spend their peak creative hours manipulating data instead of crafting compelling messages that convert.

Decision Lag Kills Momentum: By the time you've cleaned your data and generated reports, market conditions have shifted, opportunities have passed, and competitors have moved ahead.

Attribution Confusion Breeds Bad Decisions: Without real-time, accurate attribution, you're making million-dollar budget decisions based on incomplete or outdated information.

Finance Friction Slows Growth: When your marketing team can't quickly reconcile spend with performance, finance teams lose confidence, budgets get cut, and growth stalls.

The Need for SpendOps: A Completely New System of Work

Flyweel recognized that spreadsheet-driven reporting wasn't just a tooling issue—it was a systemic blind spot requiring a completely new approach. SpendOps isn't just another analytics platform—it's a new system of work, an agentic intelligence platform built specifically to liberate your creative talent from data drudgery.

The SpendOps Revolution: From Reactive to Orchestrative

SpendOps represents a fundamental shift in how high-performance marketing teams operate. Instead of forcing human creativity into spreadsheet servitude, SpendOps orchestrates rather than reports. It provides real-time capital allocation, precise financial logic, and seamless integration across your marketing and finance data.

It doesn't just visualize data—it acts on it. It moves money, enforces logic, and maximizes yield in real-time, freeing your creative genius to do what they do best: create campaigns that convert.

The SpendOps Advantage: Five Critical Workflows That Actually Work

SpendOps moves beyond traditional spreadsheet constraints, solving your fundamental operational pains:

Budget Automation: Real-time auto-reallocation based on live ROI eliminates the need for manual budget shuffling across platforms. No more logging into five different ad accounts to move money around.

Unified Visibility: Ad, CRM, ERP, and revenue data combined in one control layer means no more hunting across multiple systems for a complete picture. Everything you need in one place.

Reliable Attribution: Every marketing dollar linked directly to revenue, not platform guesswork, giving you confidence in your optimization decisions. Finally know what's actually working.

Automated Reconciliation: Daily closing of books eliminates the nightmare of manual quarterly reconciliation that pulls your team away from strategic work. Finance loves you again.

Secure Payments: Spend is segmented, fraud-resistant, and margin-protective, removing the constant worry about payment failures killing campaigns. Sleep better at night.

SpendOps in Action: Liberating Creative Talent

Unlike traditional reporting systems that turn marketers into data janitors, SpendOps proactively adjusts budgets, instantly reallocates spending based on performance signals, and provides real-time analytics customized to your unique business needs.

With SpendOps, your creative teams experience:

• Freedom from Spreadsheet Slavery: No more manual data manipulation, reformatting, or chasing down numbers across multiple platforms. Your creative team can actually be creative.
• Real-Time Decision Power: Instant access to actionable insights means you can pivot campaigns, adjust budgets, and capitalize on opportunities as they emerge. Strike while the iron is hot.
• Creative Focus Recovery: When systems handle the data orchestration, your creative talent can focus on what drives revenue: crafting compelling campaigns and optimizing for conversion.
• Confidence in Attribution: Knowing exactly which campaigns drive revenue lets your team double down on winners and kill losers with precision. No more guessing games.

The Voice of Frustrated Marketers Validates the SpendOps Need

One marketer shared in the same Reddit discussion:

We pay about $1k/month for Supermetrics, but it's become so unreliable we're ready to invest in a full-service, reliable alternative.

Another comment on Supermetrics' reliability noted a pricing concern (Source):

Supermetrics pricing is not stable—they change it every single year increasing it 2...3... or even 4 times. If you want a long-term relationship with a tool... you need stable pricing.

This isn't just about tools—it's about reclaiming the time and mental energy of your most valuable marketing talent. When your creative genius spends half their week in spreadsheets instead of creating breakthrough campaigns, you're not just wasting money—you're actively sabotaging your competitive advantage.

The Flyweel Philosophy: Defensible Growth Through Intelligent Systems

High-growth companies don't just grow fast—they grow smart. They automate critical processes, govern scalable operations, and architect systems that protect margins from day one while liberating human creativity for its highest and best use.

Flyweel's SpendOps system transforms paid growth into a defensible, accountable, and intelligent discipline. It eliminates the guesswork and manual drudgery that transforms creative marketers into data analysts—a fundamental misallocation of talent in an environment where every dollar and every hour counts.

SpendOps as the New Operating System, The Enabler

We fuse performance signals with financial logic, making ad budgets self-adjusting, fraud-resistant, and profit-aligned. No more lagging spreadsheets. No more "check back next quarter" finance cycles. Just real-time capital allocation that operates at the speed of growth while your creative talent focuses on what matters most: creating campaigns that convert.

We are not another dashboard. We are the clearinghouse, the switchboard, the command center that orchestrates your marketing capital with surgical precision.

The Real Cost of Inaction: What Happens When Creative Genius Gets Buried

Consider the opportunity cost of your current system. Every hour your best creative minds spend wrestling with spreadsheets is an hour they're not:

• Crafting breakthrough campaigns that could 10x your conversion rates
• Identifying new audience segments that could unlock million-dollar opportunities
• Optimizing creative assets that could dramatically reduce your cost per acquisition
• Developing strategic partnerships that could exponentially expand your reach

When you calculate the true cost of SpreadsheetOps—not just in tools and time, but in lost creative output and missed opportunities—the need for SpendOps becomes crystal clear.

Making the Transition: From Spreadsheet Chaos to Orchestrated Growth

The shift to SpendOps isn't just about adopting new technology—it's about fundamentally reimagining how your marketing organization operates. It's about recognizing that your creative talent is your most valuable asset and ensuring that asset is deployed where it can generate maximum impact.

Teams that make this transition report not just improved efficiency, but renewed energy and excitement from their creative staff who can finally focus on what they do best: creating campaigns that convert prospects into customers and customers into advocates.

The Choice That Defines Your Competitive Future

The dysfunction of current workflows, with rigid templates, manual workflows, and unreliable connectors, is no longer sustainable. The frustration marketers experience daily highlights an urgent need for a new system of work.

SpendOps is that system. It empowers marketing teams to act proactively, respond instantly, and align closely with pipeline realities while liberating creative talent to focus on what drives revenue.

Either continue burying your creative genius in spreadsheets—or adopt SpendOps as your new system of work. Your pipeline, your marketing team's sanity, and your bottom line depend on it.

Your creative talent didn't join your team to become data janitors. They joined to create campaigns that convert. SpendOps ensures they can do exactly that.

Marketing doesn't wait. Neither should your decision to liberate your creative genius from spreadsheet purgatory.