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by Geoffrey McDonald Bowll

on Apr 2

Guerrilla Guide: Selecting an agency

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How creatives charge

Make no mistake, if you don’t remunerate them well, no one will be motivated to work for you. There are seven key ways for agencies to charge, but none of these are mandatory now and it’s usual for only two or three to be in your contract:

Media commissions
The original percentage of spend approach, usually 10 percent. This of course encourages high media spend, low creativity.

Service fees
A basic up until about 10 years ago, service fees are almost unused nowadays. They used to be 7.5 percent of total spend.

Hourly rates
Run normally against a timesheet, these reflect the work done. It may cost you more than you want, but is no doubt pretty fair for all.

Project fees
Usually quoted at a flat rate. Be careful to include multiple versions of copy, as you may change your mind at great cost. Small creative groups spend hours accurately costing each job, then go broke and disappear.

Retainers
A fee per month that usually has X number of tasks in it, and an over-run if there’s extra work. Almost all PR firms live on this system alone. Can be good value, can leave you wondering what they did for last month’s $10,000.

Hit fees
Sometimes a brilliant idea, logo, TVC, product concept comes from someone you don’t want to sleep with, but are happy to dance around a hall with. You can pay an agency a once-off fee for the idea and everyone’s happy. You could rip it off, but hopefully they’d sue you for theft of copyright.

Sales/results
Some strugglers (client or agency) try to sell a percentage of sales deal. These are notoriously hard to measure, hard to contract for, hard to follow up and can lead to very nasty court cases. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The inimitable Geoffrey Bowll delivers the inside line on how to go about selecting a creative agency

I’m sitting spinning on my ‘director’s’ chair, drumming my fingers, scheming up something evil I can suggest to a client, to rip more precious lucre from their customers’ plastic accounts. And I’m wondering what lunch might look like, who I’m having it with. I’m bored, of course.

It’s a condition that lives with you night and day when you’re over 40 and have been in the same business for more than 10 years. There are hundreds of thousands of us ‘executives’, unexcited, but competent, out there in the ‘burbs, making up the decision-making class, wondering what little adjustments we can make to our lives to let a bit of spice in. I stare at the phone, thinking, as one does, if I had the right number, and knew whose name to drop, I could speak to George Bush or Vladimir Putin in 10 seconds. I wonder what changes to our existence I could manage, if I said just the right thing…

Like a Volvo coming off the production line, praying it will end up in the hands of someone who can drive, the phone rings. I’ve obviously willed it to ring. I can now claim involvement in a miracle.

It’s a bloke. He asks me to tell him about Starship. I give him the usual 30-second ‘lift-stopper’. That’s what we do, who we handle. He tells me he’s been to our website, and that he’d like to come in to our office and discuss a project. I ask him for an idea of what it’s about, and he says a few sentences that explain his company, what they make, where they sit in their market and what they spend on advertising. We agree on a time to meet. The whole conversation takes about three minutes.

Oh goody. New business. I’m suddenly excited again. Something to get my teeth into, to think about. And that’s exactly how it happens. It’s not complicated.

This article is about how to make that choice, from someone who has pitched to hundreds of clients. (Sometimes they’ve made the right decision. Sometimes that’s choosing Starship. Sometimes the right decision has nothing to do with our agency.) This is not from a client’s perspective; it is, as the guy in the purple says, from the pulpit.

There are a few things to consider before you pick up the phone and ask directory assistance for the most phoned agency.

Agencies are full of salespeople

No one survives in agency land who can’t sell an idea to a client. So what they say/do is designed to get you hooked. It may be all eager and earnest, it may be very business-like. Or not. Just because they come across uninterested or ‘cool’ don’t think for a moment that that isn’t their act. It is. Take everything that is said or promised as a possibility only. Agencies are great at selling you the world and giving you Dubbo. That’s why the rest of society says we’re wankers.

People have to make money

Agencies are businesses. They are not retirement homes for ageing journalists or stepping stones for creatives on their way to Hollywood, however the individuals within them see themselves. You must make their time worth it, or they can’t work on your business. Accept that people with more brains cost more money – don’t buy on the basis of price alone.

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