Category: Retainer Models

With this misleading practice, your agency may be trying to recoup a bonus of up to 20% on their retainer. Details here, it is all to do with billable time.

A full-time retained resource is full-time. But, why are there advertisers who have full-time retained resources who are unavailable to take a call?

Over the last 12 months, larger agencies have been able to use their agency churn to reduce costs and improve their bottom line significantly. How?

Reading the trade media on the trend towards agency project fees, you would think that the agency retainer is dead, (along with the Agency of Record). And while the ANA Agency Compensation Survey shows that the retainer is not as common as it once was, it still accounts for a significant proportion of major agency remuneration models and is well and truly alive and well. But lets be honest, while the agency retainer is often set and forget, it has a few problems especially with the way many of these retainers are set up and managed. In fact while many advertisers and their agencies often default to the retainer model it has more problems then most are willing to recognise. Makes you wonder why it became so popular in the first place.

While the reported trend is to move away from the resource-based retainer, it continues to be popular with agencies because of the guarantee of cost recovery and cash flow and with advertisers because of the “all you can eat” and “set and forget” convenience. The reason for the move away from the popular retainer is because of the increasing fragmentation of the advertisers scope of work requirements, resulting in an increased number of agencies on the roster and a diminishing in the prevalence and importance of the Agency of Record (AoR). There is also the continued downward pressure on costs in an attempt to drive greater cost efficiencies and ultimately cost reduction in marketing.

When I worked in Medical Research, there were no time cards or timesheets. They were for the nursing staff and the medicos, […]

Many marketers have moved from media commissions and service fees to retainer-based remuneration models. Yet although retainers often provide a minimum of […]

Many advertisers have moved from the old fashion media commission and service fee to retainers based on retaining a set resource, the […]