How much to pay for agency services is a prime consideration especially when budgets are tight.  Equally important are how the remuneration agreement is structured and the management practices that are employed to ensure efficiency, accountability and transparency.

You will probably already be using external consultants to assess the value of your expenditure – media auditors, compliance auditors or production cost consultants to name but a few.  Up to now though there hasn’t been a service for agency remuneration that’s based on reliable empirical evidence, that’s custom tailored to you and does not cost an arm and a leg.

The ARC/ISBA Paying for Advertising reports and the equivalent surveys in major markets are widely recognised as the definitive source for agency remuneration data, trends analysis and advice.   

Whilst our reports provide detailed data that is useful in a number of ways they can never provide custom data that matches your circumstances or custom advice on what changes could be beneficial to you. 

That’s why ARC is pleased to announce a new service to marketers and procurement professionals.   The new service – Custom One - will enable you to benchmark your creative and media agency remuneration agreements with greater relevance to your specific circumstances than ever before… at a low cost.

That’s because Custom One enables benchmarking by scope of agreement, sector, size of expenditure, size of agency retained or length of client/agency relationship.

The custom report will identify how your current or proposed agreement essentially ‘stacks up’ against others on a wide variety of metrics (equivalent net rates paid, hourly charge out rates, agency profit paid etc.).  It compares the practices and methods that you employ against your chosen benchmark set.

By comparing your attitudes to your agreement the custom report also identifies how to make improvements to achieve greater satisfaction.

In essence the custom report might suggest changes to rates paid, the remuneration methods and the management practices to achieve a more effective and efficient agreement.

Of course it may well be that what you are already doing requires little change.  Then the report will serve as evidence to support and justify your approach internally.  The report will in any case provide empirical evidence to help defend your position when bidding for budgets.

Overall Custom One provides a simple actionable report identifying opportunities to improve your remuneration agreements.  It will be an essential first step that defines where the opportunities lie.  You can then determine the best strategy and method of implementation that achieves the goals.

Because it is based on ARC data you can be sure that Custom One is independent, academically rigorous and entirely confidential.   ARC remuneration data is second to none in terms of scope, coverage and detail.

Both our existing database and your own input are not only anonymous, but identity can never be inferred, such as from a small data set.  For this reason if the desired custom benchmark set is too small to protect anonymity (or to be reliable) ARC will find the most appropriate set that has validity and is confidential.  

Each Custom One report is unique to you.  It provides the mean data for the benchmark set chosen by you against your own data.  Where there is significant variation about a mean this will be indicated.  The benchmark set will always have to be of a sufficient size to ensure validity and confidentiality.  The Custom One service does not provide detailed benchmarking specifically for Payment by Results (PBR) schemes, although this is possible as an additional service.