It’s time to stop discounting our industry’s most valuable assets
In the first of a series of columns for Mumbrella, Tumbleturn Marketing Advisory managing partner Jen Davidson dissects agency pricing and concludes the industry has “built a pricing model that values the replaceable while devaluing the irreplaceable”.
The author Jen Davidson
Warren Buffett famously said “Price is what you pay; value is what you get.”
The longstanding practice of bundling top agency talent as “free” value-adds in retainers has fundamentally devalued the agency’s most critical asset. This pattern appears repeatedly in pitches; leadership teams positioned as complementary resources rather than premium offerings. The intent seems clear, but the practice has systematically undermined what should be the agency’s primary differentiator: the expertise and strategic thinking of its leaders.
The irony is stark. The very people who built the agency’s reputation, who possess the relationships and institutional knowledge clients actually want, become afterthoughts in pricing structures. This not only erodes margins but signals that senior expertise isn’t worth paying for, a message increasingly difficult to reverse once established.
An industry unlike any other
In almost every professional services sector, senior expertise is “the product” and it’s paid for accordingly. Law firms, accountancies, and management consultancies make partner time scarce and valuable. Senior involvement signals strategic importance and quality assurance. And yet our creative and media agencies compete on who can bundle it in, weakening the industry’s entire value proposition in the process.
It’s an opportunity for those of us who can and do get this working in a part of the market where it makes sense.
We named our business after the idea that clients work with principals of the business – and of course a talented wider team. And it has powered us for 30 years.
It’s probably fair to say that it’s a little easier when (a) you’re independent and have skin in the game, (b) you’re scaled up and have a stable bench of senior people to deliver in reality and not just the pitch, and (c) you do work as we do in the brand space that is not typically BAU or executional in nature.
When most of the work is made up of tricky strategic and systematic problem-solving and senior stakeholder management, the value of senior people is more obvious. When the work is cyclical, executional or repetitive, then the value is less obvious for sure – and the case to in-house and automate is strong.
The “leaders” are given away for free because ultimately they don’t do much work on the business.
The compound issue is the senior experience is often frequently impractical to a client and not something that can help them – most senior people in many agencies now are specialists in generating money from the client, not making money for the client.
Very hard to generate breakthrough thinking when many agencies are selling their own services and view clients as prospects for this.
Absolutely. Why would any client choose to work with an agency staffed by inexperienced talent, which is all most agencies can now afford? The industry has become remarkably young, often fronted by a token senior who’s there for optics or politics, not because they’ve done the work. Agencies can’t even afford to bring in top-tier makers /freelancers anymore. The real talent has left, some for better opportunities, others for good.