Estimated Project Fee

All work but the agency is estimated at time of briefing and approved. A common hybrid model sees a small retainer underpinning this approach to provide consistency of account management. Projects can either be held to the approved estimate or reconciled to actual.

• • Where projects are either particular complex or unique then the agency fee is best based on an estimated resource plan and cost to deliver the project.
  • This requires the project to be well specified with detailed deliverables and outputs and project milestones and timelines.
  • Changes to the project specification requires an additional estimate for approval to cover the proposed changes.
  • Also estimated project fees can have variable components outside the estimated and approved fee such as production, which would be added as a mark up or an additional estimated resource fee.

Advantages

• Easy to negotiate based on immediate needs.
• Very flexible. However, paying for services on a project by project basis generally comes at a 10%-20% premium.
• Easy to budget for a specific campaign as deliverables agreed on an as needs basis.
• Gives the agency guaranteed resources on a project by project basis.

Implications

• This is hard to budget a year in advance unless the budget is fixed.
• Often leads to less brand consistency and alignment to the over-arching brand and communications strategy.
• Bigger campaigns can often loose some of the synergies if assets are created by channel only, rather than integrated thinking.

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