If you engage a lawyer, financial planner, management consultant, or architect, beyond a free fifteen-minute call, you’re paying for his or her time. Yet, in advertising, it’s been one-hundred years of competent people dumping their time out into the street as if it were spoiled milk.
Why?
Historically, the agency’s leverage was in its group purchasing power. The agency represented a slew of clients and together those clients could get much better rates on media than what was possible if the brand went it alone. Basically, the brand needed the agency and vice versa. The couple was tied at the hip.
This shotgun wedding brought about mutual gouging. The brand gouged the agency at the outset because they had leverage: they were going to work with someone. So they compelled the agency to kiss the ring and commit many hours unpaid to proposals, wining and dining, and getting shot in the eye on pheasant hunting debacles.
On the other side, the agency up-charged the brand for media, offering little visibility. The brand new it was getting ripped off, but it wasn’t sure exactly where or how.
The shotgun marriage hung in there for years, both sides resenting the other. Timeless art and unforgettable campaigns came out of the relationship, as did toxicity.
Now the dynamic is changing, and the brands caught up faster than the agencies. The internet and its aggregation power reduced media costs and diminished the benefit of group purchasing. Also, new technology brings information parity, which means brands understand their returns better. They have visibility, so the agency can’t upcharge like it did in the good ol’ days.
This means that brands have much less leverage to gouge agencies for free proposals, yet agencies haven’t gotten the memo: they continue to comply en masse to resource-sucking, unpaid RFPs, often for low-commitment projects that are dramatically shrinking in scope.
So it’s time to end the unpaid RFP.
How do you start the revolution?
