Had a coffee with a media buyer who made me rethink our retainer model

Met up with a guy I used to work with at a big shop in Chicago. He's at a smaller agency now doing programmatic buying. He told me straight up that most agency retainer partnerships are structured wrong because the agency gets paid for time spent rather than performance tied to actual outcomes. Said he's seen shops drag out simple tasks just to bill more hours. It hit different because I've been feeling the same way about some of our partner agencies but couldn't put words to it. Anyone else run into this and figure out a better way to structure things?

3 comments

3 Comments

adam7512mo ago

Yeah that switched my head around too.

jennifer9652mo ago

Kierkegaard actually said the same thing a hundred years before that.

thomas.tyler17d ago

Yeah that one really got me too. What helped me was going back and reading some of his earlier stuff like "Fear and Trembling" after hearing that take. It clicked way harder the second time around because I could see how he was building on that same idea but just framing it different. I had to sit with it for a few days and let it bounce around in my head before it really sank in. Sometimes you just gotta give it time and not force the switch to happen all at once.