A couple executives just plainly admitted how crazy inefficient our spending was, so I just can’t imagine how they could possibly go back to blow nearly a million a year in ads any time soon, or ever, when 90% of our revenues come from traditional enterprise deals that don’t have anything to do with ads, for the most part. They are all just worried that they will have to accept a down round in a year, and are trying to mitigate that.
By the way, this is true for engineering as well, where I work: now that we figured out how to remain productive while cutting 40% of our AWS costs (spot instances, killing idle instances more often, ...), will we ever go back to be inefficient and leaving idle AWS clusters up at night just because “money is not an issue”? Very unlikely. And the marketing department wasn’t being run any more efficiently than engineering, budgets were just fat because money was free for nearly a decade.
All we have to go on for that is your opinion about how the company was being run, which isn't backed by any sort of data.