Do You Know Where Your Marketing Dollars Are Going?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one.

A senior living operator walks into a marketing agency. The agency tells the operator that they can place ads in top markets, in top outlets, and they’ll only keep 15% of the advertising spend in fees.

What the agency doesn’t disclose is that they use a third party to place the ads, and retain another 30%, for a total of 45% in fees.

The operator thinks eighty-five cents of every dollar is going into ads. Instead, it is usually more like fifty-five cents.

“This is a dishonest practice,” says Brandon Wolf, CEO of Digital Wolf Agency. “And most operators are unaware of how to identify it.”

Wolf is working to educate operators on where their advertising dollars are actually going, and how much bang they’re getting for their advertising buck. Operators are taking notice. This month, the full-service digital marketing agency was named to the Inc. 5,000 list as one of America’s fastest-growing private companies.

“Budgets are not infinite. We’re not a big believer in buying packages,” Wolf says. “What we do is work with each client, evaluate their strategic needs, and guide them to the top areas they need to focus on pursuant to their budget.”

Here is a look at how operators are often undercut by their own marketing agencies — and Wolf’s one key question that operators must ask their marketing agencies today.

What many marketing agencies don’t tell their operator clients

Wolf founded Digital Wolf Agency in February of 2019. His views on marketing transparency stem from two polar-opposite business experiences: his father’s as a small-business owner, and his own working for an advertising agency whose top client was Subway.

When a marketing agency places an ad, the agency keeps a percentage as a management commission fee. Wolf’s agency was managing a $50 million digital ad budget for Subway, and with those high volumes, the rate that Subway paid to the agency was fairly low: about 15%.

Wolf’s father owns a small mattress manufacturer and was advertising his factory-direct store. As they compared notes, Wolf’s father confidently talked about what a great deal he was getting through his local marketing agency, thinking that only twenty-five cents of every dollar he spent went to the agency.

Using the tools at his disposal through Subway, Wolf realized that in reality, his father was sending sixty cents of every dollar to the agency, because the agency was using a third-party placement service to place his father’s ads, and they kicked some of Wolf’s father’s money to that third-party service.

“That really angered me, because my father’s a small-business owner thinking he’s getting a great deal, and here I am working nationally with Subway restaurants and seeing that only fifteen cents of every dollar they spend goes to management fees,” Wolf says. “It felt incredibly unfair.”

Around the same time, Wolf started looking into the ad agency arrangements for senior care operators, and saw them encounter similar challenges as his father: they were unwittingly spending more on fees than they thought.

“These smaller agencies were not placing the ads directly themselves,” Wolf says. “They were taking the order from the senior care operator, and then they had essentially a middleman placing the ad with Google, YouTube, SnapChat, TikTok, whoever it might be. And they were not disclosing that middleman commission fee.”

So while the agency would tell the operator that they were only keeping 10-20% of their budget on fees, they would not tell them that the middleman would keep another 20-40%.

“What the operator was actually paying was in the neighborhood of between 40% and 60% commission instead of getting what we call ‘direct placement,’” Wolf says. “And that caused me to found Digital Wolf: to help small companies and mid-size companies, like my father’s, that don’t have $50 million media budgets to still get a good placement, a direct placement at a fully disclosed commission rate.”

The one question to ask your marketing agency

The Inc. 5,000 named the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based Digital Wolf Agency its No. 1,633 fastest-growing American company of 2025, ranking 137 in the Advertising, Marketing & PR category. It’s a ranking that is hard earned and well deserved.

And for operators who want to determine if their marketing agency is keeping more on fees than they’re letting on, Wolf recommends that they ask their agencies one key question:

“Do you directly place my ads, or do you use a third-party company?”

It’s a simple question, and the answer can help operators save big money. One other tip from Wolf: check the agency’s website for someone on staff whose title is “media buyer.”

“If they don’t have that, they aren’t usually doing direct placement,” he says.

As the baby boomers continue to age into senior living, Wolf is seeing their marketing needs increase. Costs are increasing too, but budgets might not be able to grow at the same pace. And as traditional media sources — radio, television, newspapers — continue to cede ground to digital media, the ability for operators to ask the right questions is critical.

“I think there is a murkiness to digital that people don’t understand, and that allows agencies to get double-dipping fees through outsourcing parts of the marketing tasks,” Wolf says. “I founded the agency so that companies like my father’s don’t get taken advantage of in the sometimes shady advertising world. If I can save money for small or midsize operators, ones that might be struggling with NOI, and help them reduce waste by understanding exactly where their marketing money is going, that is what I want to do.”

This Views article is sponsored by Digital Wolf Agency. To learn more about how to best optimize your marketing budget, visit them at digitalwolfagency.com.

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