The retainer question: what an agency should actually cost

Agency pricing is one of the few areas of marketing where the industry has quietly agreed not to be rigorous. Here is a plain accounting of the three common models and what each one incentivises.

Percentage of spend

Typically 8–15% of media spend. Simple, scales with the account, and universally disliked by anyone who thinks about incentives for more than a minute — because it pays your agency more when they spend more of your money, and pays them less when they find efficiency.

Defensible when: the account is genuinely in aggressive scale mode and both parties agree growth in spend is the shared objective.

Indefensible when: the right answer for the quarter is to cut spend and fix conversion rate.

Flat retainer

A fixed monthly fee, usually £6,000–£30,000 depending on channel count, spend under management and creative volume. This is what we use for most engagements. It decouples our revenue from your budget, which means we can recommend cutting spend without recommending against ourselves.

The failure mode is scope drift: a flat fee attached to an ever-growing remit. Fix it by defining scope in deliverables — channels managed, creatives produced per month, tests shipped per quarter, reporting cadence — and re-scoping openly when the work changes.

Performance-based

A base fee plus a share of incremental revenue or profit above an agreed baseline. Attractive in theory and genuinely hard in practice, because it requires both parties to agree on a baseline, an attribution method and an incrementality standard before any money moves. When those things are agreed honestly, it is the best-aligned model in the industry. When they are not, it becomes an argument that ends the relationship.

Defensible when: measurement is mature enough to support a holdout-verified baseline.

What we charge, plainly

Performance media engagements start at £7,500/month for a single channel and typically run £12,000–£24,000/month for full-funnel programmes with creative production. Influencer programmes start at £6,500/month plus creator costs, which are passed through at cost with no markup — we will show you the invoices. Combined programmes are quoted as one retainer, not two, because the two teams work as one.

Media spend is paid directly to the platforms by you. We never take custody of client media budget, and we would encourage scepticism toward any agency that wants to.