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Big hold co and other traditional agencies just have too much overhead. They need to feed mouths plus feed shareholders. Why pay for an agency scope that taxes for every position in the agency (Who do you think pays for the CCO, the CEO, the CFO, the CSO - the agencies hide pieces of their comp in every scope), when you can in-house some some of work for 60 cents on the dollar, and go to a small hot indie shop of senior talent that has 5 people in it. I am in-house and we pay 150-300k for big level thinking on special briefs with an indie, but in-house and produce the rest ourselves. This is what's happening. Our total internal overhead charge is just a few million total (I manage the budget) in people overhead against the P&L, for 20+ total people across all channel roles. I worked on some teams in the past of just 8-10 account and creative and the scope was 10's of millions. Math aint mathin'.
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Hey, I’m a freelancer and in the process of forming a small collective with my creative partner to basically bypass agencies that hire us to solve creative problems, and to just go directly to the clients themselves. We have seen what the agencies charge clients for basically hiring us to develop a campaign. Gen the agency is barely involved, and they pay us a fraction of what they’re making for just being middlemen. From what the client pays them, they pay all the people who never touched the project, including CDs, ECDs, CCOs, other high level strat people, etc. It’s fucking insane.
Anyway, all this to ask your take on how we can better position ourselves to approach clients directly. We actually just would like chances to be invited to pitch projects against the larger agencies. We just care about the creative big level thinking. We can handle film production if necessary, but we don’t care to handle any media or any production of the other little demanding things (like banners, experiential etc.).
Any pointers you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
I believe the entire agency is permanently contracting. Some agencies will be winners, particularly small nimble indies that can bother taking smaller accounts for revenue, but overall there's just going to be less jobs to go around.
*Based on agency rankings, client business results, and awards. Not a perfect science but if a large brand were to seek an AOR we would very likely be in the running.