Why we publish our prices

Our fees are on the pricing page, in dollars. Most agencies will not do that, and the reasons they give are sincere: every client is different, the scope sets the price, a number on a page would be misread. All true. All also convenient. This is the full case for publishing, including what it costs us, so you can judge whether the agency you are talking to has a reason or an excuse.

Why do most agencies hide the fee?

Because a hidden fee can be set after the agency has looked at you. The discovery call is not for discovering your business; it is for discovering your budget. The questions sound like diligence. What is your revenue, what did you spend last year, who else are you talking to. Each one narrows the number the proposal will carry, and the proposal arrives a week later with the fee set to what you looked able to pay.

This is not villainy. It is how an agency with a mixed book of clients keeps its margin: the fee stretches to the client, and nobody on the client's side can compare it to anything. It depends is a true sentence. It is also the most profitable sentence in the industry, and it is said most often by the people who benefit from it most.

There is a second reason, less discussed. A hidden fee protects an agency from its competitors. If nobody publishes, nobody has to defend a number against a rival's number, and the comparison the buyer most wants to make is the one the buyer cannot make.

What does that cost the buyer?

Time first. A hidden fee means a call to find out whether a conversation is even possible, then a proposal, then a week, then the discovery that the number was never within reach. Multiply that by the three or four agencies a careful buyer talks to and the search has eaten a month before a single ad has run.

Then the comparison. With no published number, the buyer compares proposals, and proposals are written to be incomparable: different scopes, different bundles, different words for the same work. The buyer ends up comparing decks, which is comparing the sales skill of the people who wrote them.

Then the anchor. A fee that arrives inside a proposal arrives beside a list of everything the agency will do, and it is read against that list rather than against the market. The buyer has no idea whether the number is high, because the only number they have seen is this one. A founder who cannot audit the work, and most cannot, has lost the one thing they could have audited: the price.

What does publishing do to the first call?

It removes the qualification. Nobody books the call to find out whether they can afford us, because they already know. They book it to find out whether we can get them to the number they need, which is the only question worth thirty minutes of anyone's time.

So the call is thirty minutes, there is no deck, and it starts at your number rather than ours. You tell us what you need the business to do by the end of the quarter. We tell you, out loud, whether we think the work can get there and what it would take. If the answer is no, the call ends early and nobody has been pitched. Nobody who guarantees a number is telling you the truth, and a call that starts with the fee settled has no reason to pretend.

The published fee also loses the wrong enquiry before it costs anyone a call. The person who wanted the cheapest possible price leaves the pricing page without booking, which is the right outcome for both of us. The person who stays has already decided the fee is possible, so the call is about the work.

What are the two fees?

Two published numbers and a third tier that is written to your target. The full list is on the pricing page; the shape is below.

Starter is one of the three, not all three. We say that on the page because the most common disappointment with any agency is a scope that was assumed rather than read. Standard excludes paid media management, on-site shoots and website builds, and says so in the same breath. The exclusions are what make the inclusions believable.

Tailored has no published number, and from a distance that looks like the thing this whole article argues against. The difference is the method. The fee is set against the number you want to hit, after we have seen the account, and we show you how we arrived at it. A price with its working shown is not a hidden price. A price that appears at the end of a deck is.

Why is ad spend never a percentage?

Because a share of spend pays an agency more for spending more, and the agency is the one setting your budgets. That is the wrong incentive to hand to the person with a hand on the dial. The industry norm is a percentage, and the norm has quietly made every budget recommendation in the industry suspect.

Our fee is flat. Your advertising spend is yours, it is billed by the platform to your own card, it stays in an account in your name, and we never route it through us. The only way we earn more is if you decide the work was worth more and buy more of it. The spend and the fee live in different places on purpose, so you can always see which is which.

What do we lose by publishing?

Enquiries. A number on a page lets people leave without talking to us, and some of those people could have been talked into a fee they could stretch to. We do not get to find out. That is a real cost and we feel it in the inbox.

Price. Some buyers would have paid more than the published fee and would have been content to. A hidden price would have captured that. A published one gives it away, every time, to everyone.

Competitors. Every agency in Karachi and a fair few in New York can read our rate card and undercut it by a dollar. We have made their pitch easier to write.

And the figure dates. We changed it once already this year and we will change it again, which means a page we have to keep honest, and an article like this one that reads the number from the same place the pricing page does rather than typing it twice. A published price is a maintenance commitment. Most agencies would rather not make it.

So why do it anyway?

Because the buyer who cannot audit the work can audit the price, and a studio that says the number on the fee is easier to believe when it says the number on the result. We publish The Gallery's return on its ad spend and the hours the listing platform took off Frank Zoller Authentic History's desk, and both of those claims would be worth less coming from a studio that would not tell you what it costs.

Because the call is better. A first call that starts at the buyer's number, with the fee already settled, is the most honest half hour in this business, and it is the one we want to have.

And because we are not the cheap option and we do not pretend to be. A hidden fee lets an agency be whichever option the buyer hopes it is. A published one makes us say what we are, in advance, to everyone. That is uncomfortable, and that is the point.

When is a published fee the wrong signal?

When the scope is genuinely unknowable at the start: paid media across several markets, a product that has to be designed before it can be priced, a shoot with a crew. Those are Tailored, and we say so rather than squeezing them under a published number that would be wrong in both directions. And when a buyer wants the fee to be the whole conversation. If the only question is whether we are cheaper than the next shop, the answer is no, and the pricing page has saved us both a call.

Everyone else gets the number before they get the pitch. Then the call is about what the number has to buy, which is where it should have started all along.