Solving the Late Payment Puzzle in Adtech
Late payments are a blight on the adtech industry. The average digital media supplier now waits well over 100 days to receive payment for work carried out, while in one prominent case, a leading brand specified360-daypayment terms in an RFP. This type of approach to remunerating suppliers not only kills cashflow, it stifles creativity, innovation and growth. Agencies and other ad tech suppliers can’t concentrate on producing great work when they are living in fear of the money running out.
And while it’s a subject rarely discussed in public, the scale of the problem is immense. A 2025 study found that 1.5 million businesses in the UK are affected by late payments each year, resulting in the closure of 38 businesses each day. Businesses are owed an estimated £26 billion in late payments at any given time, and the issue costs the UK economy almost £11 billion each year.
So how do we solve this seemingly intractable problem? In a session I took part in at the excellent Un//Scene creative and marketing event in London recently, a three-pronged solution emerged.
Clarity holds the key
The first element, as brilliantly outlined by Nicola Brown, founder of integrated health platform Kokoro, is clarity, and having the confidence to talk openly about money - which many of us understandably find difficult to do.
Her advice is to seek clarity when you’re first discussing the work you’re being asked to do, or even simply pitch for. Clarify the scope and the timeline, as well as the metrics that will be used to measure whether the project has been successfully completed. Be clear, too, about the payment terms you work to, and the implications of failing to deliver on them, including the imposition of late fees. Yes, it’s a difficult subject to broach, but dealing with it before there’s a problem makes later discussions far less awkward..
Similarly, seek clarity on the budget. Is the money ready to pay suppliers or is the company waiting to be paid on completion by its client before it can release funds to suppliers who have worked on the project?
Finally, Nicola advises, remember that this is a mutually beneficial relationship. If the company is commissioning you to work on a project, they need the skills and experience that you bring to it. Remember this in your negotiations with them, and you’ll be in a much stronger position.
Say it to believe it
The word ‘negotiation’ was the focus of the advice offered by the second speaker in the session, Amy Combrinck, founder of negotiation training specialist Fireflying. In Amy’s experience, most people are not comfortable negotiating, especially where money is concerned. They don’t want it to be combative, so they struggle to assert themselves and justify their position.
How to overcome this? First, Amy advised, build confidence in your argument by working out what you want to say and saying it out loud - “Say it to believe it”, as she put it in the session. Voicing your position builds confidence muscle in the same way you build physical muscle at the gym.
When you hear someone speaking in a way you would like to sound in a negotiation situation, write it down or, with their permission, record it, so you can practice using the same sort of language yourself. “If you have a phrase pre-written before an interview, before a negotiation, and you practice saying it, you're going to feel more confident and empowered when you have to say it for real,” Amy says.
Let someone else take the payment strain
Training yourself to negotiate, and making it clear to prospective partners how and when you expect to be paid are essential weapons in the fight against late payments. But ultimately, of course, no matter how clear you are, or how well you present your case for fair payment terms, your argument may still fall on deaf ears.
This is where the third approach comes into play. If it’s a piece of work or a contract that is too valuable to turn down, but you can’t accept the payment terms because you don’t have the working capital that would enable you to cope with them, consider a solution that would pay you for the work you do as soon as it’s completed - even before you’ve raised an invoice.
Seek out an adtech specialist funding platform that plugs directly into the APIs of dozens of big marketplaces; that can ingest granular, real-time transaction data, and value receivables the instant they are generated.
By shifting credit risk upstream - towards the giant, investment-grade, counterparties that ultimately release the cash - a far higher percentage of revenue can be funded at materially lower cost. And that in turn enables you to do what you do best, without worrying about when you’re going to get paid for it.
Also published in: Little Black Book Online
