Media Sales Compensation in 2025: Why Most Companies Are Getting It Wrong 

Media sales compensation leaders are making the same mistake: They’re letting plans get too complicated, and it’s costing them real money.

Companies with misaligned compensation programs only hit 76% of their sales targets. In comparison, those with effectively aligned plans achieve 103% of revenue goals—a 27-point difference that translates to millions in lost revenue.

The Complexity Trap

Here’s what’s happening: Media companies are layering on team measures, activity-based key sales objectives (KSOs), modifiers, sales program incentive funds (SPIFs) and discretionary funds to drive multiple behaviors—convergent selling, digital product adoption, self-service migration, agency partnerships. As a result, sellers earn their target incentive while missing their individual revenue quotas by wide margins.

This isn’t a theoretical scenario. Sellers achieved only 89% of quota on average in 2024, yet many companies still met their revenue targets. That gap exists because of quota over-allocation—a Band-Aid that masks deeper misalignment between what sellers are paid to do and what actually drives business results.

In response, the pressures to add complexity are pervasive. Approximately 90% of companies made plan changes in 2025, driven by profitability focus (61%), new product launches (43%) and productivity improvement (40%). Each change adds another measure, another modifier and another exception.

But the best-performing organizations resist this temptation. Account executives at top companies average just 1.7 weighted measures and 0.1 non-weighted measures—a total of 1.8 measures per plan. Rather than adding full measures, these leaders drive secondary behaviors through credit modifiers, hurdles and add-on bonuses.

Three Areas That Media Companies Are Overcomplicating

Portfolio Selling: As companies expand into connected tv (CTV), programmatic, shoppable ads and retail media networks, their initial instinct is to add separate measures for each new product.

For established product portfolios, keep one primary revenue measure and use credit modifiers to emphasize strategic products—such as a 1.5x multiplier for priority offerings—rather than splitting the plan into multiple measures.

If you have to, or really want to, put focus on a new product or something outside the core plan, use temporary SPIFs (less than three months, fewer than three per year per team) or add-on bonuses instead of creating permanent weighted metrics. Treat these as the exception, not the rule.

Self-Service Models: Companies are splitting self-service revenue into separate measures, typically weighted at 15 to 25% of the target incentive. They’re also tracking metrics like “number of self-service customers onboarded” or “self-service retained revenue.” This creates administrative burden and seller confusion.

A simpler approach? Credit 100% of self-service revenue to the seller’s main revenue measure but add a hurdle—if self-service revenue falls below a threshold, apply a credit downlift to the total payout. This keeps the plan simple while protecting against churn.

Agency Partnerships: Partnership roles present a real measurement challenge because their impact shows over quarters or years, not months. Companies are responding by adding activity-based KSOs—such as agency decision-making mapping, strategic initiative completion or preferred vendor status.

But 90% of companies still anchor these roles to production and success metrics like assigned partner revenue or average spend. The activity measures work best as non-weighted add-ons that modify payouts at the margin, not as primary measures.

What’s Driving the Changes

The compensation changes aren’t happening in a vacuum. Media organizations face legitimate market shifts. For example,  Digital ad modality is fragmenting across CTV, programmatic and gaming. At the same time, self-service platforms are handling more transactions, and the focus is shifting to a stronger balance between performance and brand advertising.

Companies are responding by expanding into high-growth areas through acquisition and partnerships, shifting account managers to more commercial roles and leveraging AI to handle routine seller enablement and service tasks.

This is where 71% of organizations implementing or planning to implement AI for compensation workflows becomes relevant. The leaders aren’t using AI to add complexity—they’re using it to manage existing complexity better. This becomes particularly useful in analytics and reporting (79%), cost modeling (72%) and quota setting (63%).

The Investment Paradox

Despite the performance gap, companies are doubling down on sales investment. Compensation budgets are rising by 8.6% on average, and 68% of organizations planned to increase headcount in 2025—the highest rate since 2019.

Here’s the problem: 52% cite driving higher productivity as their top objective. Organizations are adding more sellers and paying them more but not fixing the fundamental misalignment in their compensation plans.

What Actually Works

The formula is straightforward: Simplify your plan structure and make the upside attractive for over-performance. Companies with effectively aligned plans achieve 103% of revenue goals compared to just 76% for those with misaligned plans—a 27-point gap that compounds year over year.

71% of companies are adjusting their plans to better align pay with performance. The most common approach is paying higher for over-performance, followed by shifting to more individual vs. team metrics.

The benchmark for media organizations is clear: Keep sales compensation cost of sales between 6 and 12% of managed revenue, ensure quota vs. target incentive achievement variance stays below 10%, and keep SPIF and bonus costs under 3% of target incentive budget.

Most importantly, use non-weighted measures—credit modifiers, rate modifiers, hurdles and add-on bonuses—to drive secondary behaviors instead of adding more weighted measures. The companies getting this right are hitting their numbers.