Why US brands hire a Karachi agency
The hours, the published fee, the three things to check before you sign, and the ways offshore work goes wrong that you can see coming.
Most of the brands we work for are in the United States. We are in Karachi. People assume the reason is price, and the price is part of it, but it is the least interesting part. This is the whole argument, including the parts that cut against us.
Why do the hours matter more than the location?
Karachi runs nine or ten hours ahead of New York, depending on the season. The usual offshore pitch is that the work happens while you sleep: you send a brief at night and it is done by morning. That sounds efficient and it is the opposite. It means every question you have during your working day waits until the next one, and a campaign problem noticed at two in the afternoon is handled the next morning your time, after a night of spend.
We work the New York day. Your nine in the morning is our evening, and we are at our desks until your day ends. A message sent at three in the afternoon in New York gets an answer at three in the afternoon in New York. The cost of that is ours: our evenings and our nights, every week. We chose it because an ads account is a live thing, and a live thing needs someone awake while it is spending.
Test it rather than take our word for it. Send a question at the edge of a normal New York day during the first conversations and time the reply. Any agency, anywhere, should pass that test while it is still trying to win you. Many do not.
What does it cost, and why is that published?
The fee is on the pricing page, in dollars, and it does not change on the call. $2,000 a month buys one channel, ads, content or search, with a monthly written report and a monthly call. $4,000 a month buys the full content and findability loop. Larger work is priced to the number you want to hit, after we have seen the account.
Advertising spend is separate, it stays on your card, and we never take a share of it. A percentage of spend pays an agency more for spending more, which is the wrong incentive to give the person who sets your budgets. A flat fee means the only way we earn more is if you decide the work was worth more and buy more of it.
Publishing the figure costs us some enquiries, because a price on a page lets people leave without a call. We think that is the right trade. The call is thirty minutes and there is no deck; it is for telling us the number you need and hearing whether we think we can get there. A price you already know makes that conversation honest from the first minute.
What should you check before signing with anyone offshore?
Three things, and they are the same three whether the agency is in Karachi, Manila or Ohio. The difference is that distance makes each of them more expensive to get wrong.
- Who owns the ad account. It must be yours: your business manager, your payment method, our access granted by you and revocable by you. An agency that runs your ads from its own account owns your pixel history, your audiences and your results, and you start again from nothing when you leave.
- Where the work is done. Ask who writes the copy, who builds the creative and who reads the account every morning, by name. Then ask whether any of it is passed to a third party. Offshore work is often offshore twice: the agency you hired has hired someone cheaper. You should know every pair of hands.
- The notice period. Thirty days is reasonable. Ninety days, or a twelve-month minimum, is a sign the agency expects you to want to leave. Our contracts run month to month with thirty days' notice, and you keep the accounts, the creative and the pages when you go.
Ask for the answers in writing before you ask for a proposal. A proposal is designed to make you forget to ask.
Who do we work for in the United States?
Two clients we can name, both in categories where the detail matters and a generic agency would get it wrong.
Frank Zoller Authentic History is a militaria auction house. We built the AI platform that writes its auction listings from photographs, rebuilt zollerhistory.com and its shop, and run its marketing. The work depends on knowing the difference between two uniforms from the same war, and on being reachable during an American working day when an auction is about to close.
Gettysburg Museum of History, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, keeps a collection of uniforms, equipment and the stories of the people who carried them. We make short films from the objects in its cases, ran its October campaign for the anniversary weekend, and handle its search presence so that people looking for the museum land on the museum's own page. No figure from that work is published yet, because none has been measured and cleared, and we would rather say so than invent one.
Both are the kind of client a bigger shop would have told that their category is too narrow. The narrowness is the point. A brand with a specific audience needs an agency that will learn the subject, and learning the subject is work that does not care where the desk is.
What goes wrong offshore, and how do you see it coming?
We have watched a lot of offshore engagements fail, some of them ours, before this company existed. The failures are predictable, and nearly all of them show up in the first month if you know what to look for.
| What goes wrong | How it shows up early | What to do about it |
|---|---|---|
| Silent substitution | The person who pitched you stops appearing on calls | Name the team in the contract and require notice of any change |
| The reply gap | A question sent at lunch is answered the next morning | Write the overlap hours into the contract and test them before signing |
| Copy that lands flat | Correct English that no customer of yours would say | Pay for a test brief and read it as a customer, not as a buyer of marketing |
| Assets held hostage | The agency set up the ad account, the pixel and the domain | Everything in your name from day one, with access granted to them |
| The cheap bid | The fee is only ever framed against a local price | Ask what the fee buys that a local shop's would not; if the answer is only the price, walk |
The common thread is that each failure is cheap to prevent and expensive to discover. None of them needs a lawyer. They need three questions and a contract you read.
When should you not hire us?
If the deliverable is being in the room, we are the wrong choice: a shoot on your premises every week, a retail activation, in-person sales support. If your copy depends on regional American nuance we could not have grown up with, hire a local writer for the words and let us run the media and the measurement, which is a structure we propose ourselves. And if the only reason you are looking offshore is price, you will find someone cheaper than us and you should hire them, because cost is not the constraint your growth is under.
We are not the cheap option and we do not pretend to be. We are a studio that works your hours, publishes its price, holds none of your assets and can be let go with a month's notice. Tell us the number. We will tell you if we can.