Know-How Exchange : Advertising/PR

(As a great ad agency, we) The ad agency will quote a price based on the specific scope of your project, what you provide, what we provide, duration, the amount of creative work needed, and other factors.

Example
- Any postcard design / mailing site has tables of prices for pre-designed, standard size postcards. Then you add a multitude of variables such as volume, postage type, card coating size, custom design, multiple mailings, mailing list quality and pricing, etc. A baseline quote of $0.75 per card mailed to 550,000 may be high but to 500 people it's a smoking deal.

I suggest that you develop a written scope of the campaigns, expectation, target markets, etc. to initiate the discussions. Market conditions will dictate "what the prices should be". The baseline may have little value when hungry providers in this down economy are anxious for your business.

I suggest you prepare your needs, discuss them with select providers and negotiate from the baseline you collectively generate from their offerings.

Additionally, just because an agency may be more expensive - do they offer important needed competencies and quality others do not?

Call us through the profile if you wish further specific discussion.

Bob

hi Amy,

Phil and Bob have provided good advice.

You could take the opposite approach. Create a budget (e.g. $10,000 or ?) then request recommendations from several pre-qualified ad firms based on your goals.

Steve

You can get a reasonable grip on agency fees by first figuring out the cost of the task work if you were to simply hire it out piecemeal. A reasonable source for graphics and design costs is the Pricing and Ethical Guidelines handbook put out every year by the Graphic Artists Guild. A reasonable ballpark for copy is say $150 (for a banner ad or an email) to $500 (for a difficult or copy intensive ad). There will certainly be other elements (Flash movies, contests, etc) and it will require only a little work to build a general price for each.

Since it’s an agency, you have to then add in a multiplier, to cover overhead, account and project management and so on. Generally, figure double for small (3-5) agencies and triple for others.

So, that means a full page printed ad might cost you $1250 (I’m figuring $750 for design and art) in direct labor costs (i.e., if you hired a freelance artist and copywriter)—which is $2500 for a small agency and around $3500 for a larger.

You can add in a premium for usage (logos carry a premium pricing that banner ads don’t) as well.

GENeration doesn’t do much for me. I don’t see any customer value there.

Hope this was helpful.