When Growth Takes a Backseat: Why Media CTOs Are Betting Big on Cost Reduction

Growth—the sacred cow of investor decks and executive KPIs—is getting bumped down the agenda at media companies. What’s replacing it? Cold, hard cost control.

According to a new report from the DPP, a majority of media CTOs have made reducing costs their top priority, eclipsing the usual suspects like growing audience or boosting revenue. For public broadcasters, it’s nearly three-quarters. Commercial media isn’t far behind.

Source: DPP - Reducing Costs Now a Top Priority

This isn’t belt-tightening for the sake of it. It’s a response to years of rising complexity, bloated cloud bills, and workflows that are too brittle to adapt quickly. Especially in an environment where content distribution is fragmented across dozens of channels, formats, and platforms, complexity isn’t just annoying—it’s expensive.

The Real Cost of Cloud Optimism

A few years ago, everyone was bullish on the cloud. Elastic compute, global scale, managed services that could be spun up with a few clicks. But many teams discovered too late that this elasticity had a dark side. Costs ballooned with usage, particularly around data infrastructure—query-heavy workloads, nested data transformations, persistent caching layers to work around latency issues.

And then there’s the human cost. Complex data stacks often require specialist roles just to keep the lights on: cloud ops, devops, data engineers, security analysts, platform owners. Add the SaaS vendors, monitoring dashboards, and performance tuning overhead, and suddenly you’ve built a Ferrari to run errands.

What CTOs Are Doing Instead

The smart ones aren’t just cutting. They’re refactoring. Simplifying. Ripping out systems that don’t pay for themselves and consolidating where it counts. This doesn’t mean abandoning the cloud—it means treating it like a utility, not a lifestyle.

Many are rethinking data architecture entirely. They’re scrutinizing pipelines, auditing where data duplication occurs, questioning the need for multiple query engines. If a system can’t run lean and fast under real-world loads, it doesn’t make the cut. Because the goal isn’t austerity. It’s agility.

Where This Is Going

There’s a quiet rebellion underway against over-engineering. Against the instinct to solve every problem with another layer of tooling. Instead, the winners will be the teams that can deliver insights quickly without breaking the bank—and without six layers of abstraction.

This isn’t about going back to monoliths or rejecting modern architectures. It’s about intentional design. About choosing technologies and vendors that reduce time-to-value instead of adding latency—technical or human.

In media, where speed matters and margins are thin, the ability to ship fast, learn faster, and adapt constantly is what separates thriving organizations from those stuck in a perpetual re-platform.