What’s required from an agency?
The scope of works or scope of services – evolves over time. Often this is due to circumstance, to market or commercial developments. The commercial agreement you hold with your agency often requires review to ensure that it remains competitive and sustainable.
Using 20+ years of experience, with financial consultants specializing in agency agreements, we offer a range of marketing services that deliver you confidence in your commercial arrangement with your agency, along with clear improvement recommendations where necessary, for use in negotiation.
Agency fee benchmarking
We conduct in-depth reviews of current agency remuneration and resourcing, using proprietary industry fee benchmarking data across hundreds of data-points, to identify challenges or opportunities. Everything from major resourcing to incidental unit cost items are covered. And we can negotiate on your behalf with your agency.
Scope of work modelling
Often in an agency agreement, the fee arrangement does not keep up with the changing nature of your required scope. This can lead to cost blow-outs from agencies charging higher ‘out of scope’ fees; or, reduction in agency resourcing due to financial unsustainability. Using your inputs, we develop a bespoke agency scope of works or scope of services that can be used in pitching or development of a new remuneration model.
Agency fee modelling
There are many potential remuneration models; retained, project based, hybrid, performance based. We assess your current model and situation and build a bespoke model for you, capable of significantly improving value. And we can negotiate on your behalf with your agency.
Contractual assessment
As the industry changes, your agency contract needs to evolve, for your own protection and that of your agency. We assess your current document and advise your legal team on recommended amendments, clause inclusions or removal.
In-Housing advisory
In housing of agency services is becoming more common, but often, it’s difficult to know where to start. We provide assessment of what’s possible for you and advice on how to plan and execute a move to in-housed services.
TrinityP3’s approach works because it connects marketers and agencies in the most important way: through shared value and values. The team managing these connections understand the multiplier that is chemistry, and it’s this appreciation plus their experience that gives us the confidence to invest.
We wanted to thank you again Anton for the consultation sessions. Your insights and guidance were truly invaluable. They’ve inspired us all to think outside the box and approach our upcoming brand refresh with a renewed sense of purpose. Thanks to your expert input, we now feel confident that we’re on the right track to refine our positioning and keep true to our unique offering.
Darren’s advice to us when we started Pembleton was invaluable. Straight up, honest and insightful – his wisdom was just what we needed when it came to refining our pitch story. Always generous with his time and encouragement, Darren’s contribution to the industry, and making it as good as can be, is really something.
Darren was our go to for creds advice as his grasp on where the industry is at and what clients are interested in is second to none. We immediately actioned his no nonsense, constructive feedback, so far so good!
The TrinityP3 team’s insights were invaluable. They helped us refine our pitch, condense its structure, and chisel our storytelling to make it more impactful. Their extensive experience working with so many brands and agencies in this market for years puts their guidance in a league of its own.
We’ve had a couple of interactions with the team at Trinity P3 and have been impressed. Anton ran an excellent process, with clarity and transparency. More importantly, the process was designed specifically to measure our relevant capabilities and our chemistry with the client (the criteria that should actually be applied in a pitch, but which are often ignored). It is always a pleasure to work with TrinityP3.
I have worked with Trinity P3 on several projects, the most recent being a full commercial review of an incumbent media partner. As a university we review large commercial contracts systematically, however, we needed to ensure we could do this without the disruption of a full pitch. We approached Trinity, because of the confidence we have in their knowledge and expertise in market. Within 6 weeks a full market review was carried out with written recommendations. The process created minimal disruption to the team and provided critical benchmarks and evaluations, which ultimately gave us confidence to negotiate and renew our partnership.
I enlisted the services of Trinity P3 to perform a financial benchmark on an advertising agency. Prior to this, I had already engaged the agency for a strategic project. Instead of going through a lengthy pitch process involving multiple agencies for the creative execution, I approached Nick and his team to conduct a cost benchmark. The resulting report and analysis were impressively thorough, providing valuable insights that helped me make well-informed decisions during negotiations. I wholeheartedly endorse Trinity P3 for their professionalism and dedication to delivering actionable results promptly.
We engaged Trinity P3 to conduct an efficient yet robust media agency selection process across ANZ markets. We had a tight brief and I’ll be honest, high expectations of a new media agency – in all, I can safely say that Trinity P3 enabled us to conduct a fast and fair process.
What was of particular value for us as a client was the nuance Trinity P3 presented in their benchmarking, their adaptable approach to the process we wished to run and finally, the overall commercial common sense they brought to the process. On this latter point, the contract and fee templates were very helpful to educate our internal teams, as it is often the case that there is no specific media services agreement to hand.
Where did we end up? With a new media agency that is right sized for our current stage of growth and a motivating, performance related fee model for our new media agency partner. This would not have been possible without the guidance of Stephen and the team at Trinity P3.
Darren and Trinity P3 recently spent time with our agency to provide a fresh perspective on our positioning and value proposition. The feedback was equal parts honest, tangible and encouraging. We left our session together with two priceless gifts: (1) clarity on our path forward and (2) conviction that we are moving in the right direction. Our entire leadership team is invigorated! I highly recommend Trinity P3 to any agency that needs to take its story to the next level. Thanks, Darren!
Customer satisfaction is the goal with every project. Below are just some of the things clients have had to say about working with TrinityP3. Click here to read more Client Testimonials. And because positive client and agency relationships are integral to what we do, make sure you also read our Agency Testimonials.
Related Reading
In our unique role of identifying and solving the big challenges facing marketing management we create a huge catalogue of insights and build our knowledge and wisdom, which we share with the industry.
Case Study
Assessing Media Agency Contracts – Case Study
FAQs
Our data has been built and refined over twenty years. Our benchmarks are calibrated to you - there are a range of benchmarks based on the scope and complexity of your account, and we use assessment tools to determine this. Once the benchmark level is calibrated, we provide hundreds of data-points in our report to you, covering fees and composition of fees, resourcing and composition of resourcing, increnental cost rate-cards, out of scope rate-cards, overhead recovery and mark-up levels, third party production, and more. Using a simple traffic light approach we can decode the complexity, and show you exactly where you should be paying less, more or in a different way for the various services provided by your agency. We often find when conducting operational assessments, that service level deficits or capability issues identified in qualitative assessment can often be traced right back to the quantitative financial evaluation.
Yes, we can. We can advise on, build or work with numerous remuneration structures, including incentive and performance based.
We use detailed proprietary spreadsheets for agencies to complete, against which we base our evaluation and which can be transferred into your final agreements. We also provide contractual advice regarding agency transparency.
4. What factors do you consider when developing a bespoke agency scope of work or scope of services?
We consider a variety of factors including current and future needstates, feasibility and fit of capabilities, financial and resourcing impact and operational impact. Ultimately, a scope needs to come from you; but we are here to help with templates, advice and commercial recalibration to ensure best fit.
We make recommendations specifically related to agency responsibilities, transparency, clarity, governance, operations, financial process and service inclusions.
The respective pros and cons of any model are entirely dependent on your individual circumstance. This is one of many reasons why every project we conduct is tailored. We will advise you on best options and pros and cons of each once we have fully understood your position, and thoroughly assessed it.
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