Unlike a blog, this is not a collection of musings or things that caught our attention today. Instead, it is a collection of the important insights, trends and issues we have encountered in our work with our clients and the solutions we have developed. This is why we call it our Knowledge Centre. It is where we share the collective knowledge of TrinityP3. We add to this regularly. We update it when and where needed. We recommend bookmarking this page and be sure to visit regularly when looking for inspiration, insight and knowledge on the world of marketing management.
Top 10 ways to ensure transparency and accountability in all your print productions
When people think about print production, most marketers and procurement people think about printing. Actually putting ink on paper is less than 30% of the print production cost and yet this is where most of the cost management focus is ...
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Top 10 ways to avoid ending up in court for misleading and deceptive conduct
There is nothing more wasteful, costly and not to mention embarrassing than having your commercial or advertisement removed from air and getting a court order to provide an apology and correction. It has happened to a number of advertisers in ...
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Top 10 considerations when selecting a new media agency
Media continues to be the single biggest investment for most marketers and advertisers, yet the option continues to expand with more choices and more specialists entering the market place. So how do you go about not only choosing the right ...
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Top 10 considerations in selecting a new creative agency
In a world of increased fragmentation and diversification marketers are faced with a decision between specialist and convenience. Traditional creative agencies have diversified their offering and are providing a range of services, but it is often a matter of convenience ...
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Top 10 ways to ensure financial compliance from your agencies
With increasing pressure on budgets and expenditure outside of the retainer such as production the prime area of incremental revenue creep for agencies, it is important that there is a rigorous, but not onerous, process to ensure financial compliance from ...
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Top 10 tips for fostering collaborative agency solutions
With many projects requiring multiple channels of communication, marketers are managing many specialist agencies. This requires being able to manage these groups to maximise their collaboration and outputs. Most of the tips below are simply good project management skills, which ...
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Top 10 tips for renegotiating your agency remuneration
Obviously there are now more ways of remunerating your agencies than ever before and we work with our clients to assist in finding the best model to suit their needs. But there are some basic steps to take when you ...
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A blueprint for reducing your advertising production costs
In the 12 years TrinityP3 has been providing training and independent advice to advertisers on production and creative costs, we have found that many of these production blowouts are due to poor supplier management, rather than naked greed on behalf ...
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Top 10 tips for managing your television and video production costs
Television commercial production continues to be a significant investment for marketers and advertising. At the same time lower cost solutions are being embraced to create content for the online environments. And it's technical and complex nature means that many advertisers ...
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3 most common mistakes made by procurement when engaging with marketing
The rise of procurement in the marketing category is well documented. But there are some recurring issues where this engagement often goes awry. In the past few years I have noticed three main mistakes that often lead to poor outcomes ...
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Most 360º client agency relationship systems are misleading
I was in a discussion with a UK based company about measuring their various agency relationships around the globe and I asked them "what is it that you want to measure? Performance? Relationship? Level of collaboration?" The fact is that ...
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Balancing risk and reward in value based advertising agency compensation
Last week in NYC I was speaking at the WFA COMPAG group about Value Based Compensation (VBC). During the discussion I made the distinction that VBC can be segmented into two approaches - Output Based Price and Outcome Based Performance ...
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Defining Value Based Agency Compensation
A few weeks ago in NYC I presented the results on a survey undertaken by the WFA on Value Based Compensation (VBC) to the COMPAG Group, which will become the basis of a white paper we are preparing on the ...
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How your agency compensation method can add value
I was recently participating in a discussion in the ANA Advertising Financial Conference LinkedIn Group when Bob Cauley from Beekman & Associates chimed in with "at Beekman Associates argue that "how" you pay your agency is far less important than ...
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Not all client agency relationships are the same
I was having a conversation with one of my clients last week and they were talking about how it is demanding enough managing multiple brands within their portfolio, but with a growing number of stakeholders internally, multiple channels being used, ...
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Defining the scope of advertising agency services to determine agency fees
Traditionally, agency fees have been calculated and paid based on the cost of the inputs, the number of hours and the cost of those hours. But today's trend is to pay agencies based on the value created, going beyond cost ...
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Achieving collaboration in client agency relationships
With so many communications channels available, marketers are using a wider selection of service providers and requiring them to work closer together to provide a consistent brand communication. Some marketers are achieving this through placing all of their marketing communication ...
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The importance of overhead in agency compensation
There are a number of variables involved in the most common head hour or cost based agency compensation models being: salary costs, billable hours per year, overhead and profit margin. Each of these are often contested in negotiations, but one ...
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Why it is essential for agencies to be part of your business strategy alignment
It is interesting to see how so many marketers structure their agency arrangements. I would have to say the vast majority will certainly have defined roles for their media and creative agencies but then have a more adhoc approach to ...
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Five reasons agency compensation should not be relationship based
Don't get me wrong, measuring and managing a high quality relationship is important between agencies and marketers. But at the ANA Marketing Financial Management Conference last week in Phoenix, Arizona, there was a presentation by Sarah Armstrong from Coca Cola ...
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Calculating Agency Compensation And Resource From The Scope Of Work
How many agency account managers, strategy planners, creative copywriters, art directors, production managers, producers and coders do you need to deliver your marketing plan? This is a fundamental question facing most marketers when they are either appointing a new agency ...
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How to calculate your agency head hour rates
Your agency is proposing to charge $250 per hour for the Group Account Director or the media agency has $325 per hour for the Media Trading Director. How is this calculated? And what is the underlying salary cost? We deal ...
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Poor practice agency credentials from P&W Advertising
I have written before on how poorly many agencies present themselves in a distinctive way generally, but especially in the pitch process. And I have provided ideas for agencies on how they can be different in an undifferentiated market place ...
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TV Production: Paying for “flavour-of-the-month” or the best solution?
There is a fashionable element to advertising and creativity. Reading the zeitgeist of the market place and tapping into this can be an extremely valuable attribute in driving the brand perception. In television production, this can influence the choice of ...
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Open tenders are not the best way to select agencies
I was recently in a meeting with a marketer and their procurement team discussing a forthcoming agency review. When we got to discussing the process, I was asked by the head of marketing what process would be best. Before I ...
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Procurement panels do not always deliver on their promise
Recently I have noticed that the traditional procurement "panel" approach to supplier management has been increasingly failing to deliver. One of the key reasons for this is the increasing diversity in agency services, specialities and core capabilities driven by technology ...
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Could media agencies become the movie studios of advertising?
Having undertaken a number of media reviews for financial services clients, it has become obvious the diversity of the category and how limited the media agency options there are in the market. We were reflecting on this the other day ...
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How much time does it take to run an agency pitch?
Last week I took a call from a client who is a marketer at a major advertiser. He was enquiring about selecting a digital agency and wondered "how long should it take?" "Did you mean how much time will it ...
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Reasons why performance based remuneration or payment by results often fail
Performance based remuneration or payment by results (PBR) is a component of many agency remuneration deals, but the fact is that in most cases both agency and client will tell you that it does not work. The concept of providing ...
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What is value based remuneration for advertising and media agencies?
Retainers are still the most common form of remuneration for advertising agencies in the major markets. These retainers are based on resources multiplied by direct salary costs by overhead factor and then multiplied by profit margin. But how do you ...
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