Media/Creative/Value

There’s been more talk lately, both on this blog and on some of the photographer forums, about the media buy percentage system. As we all know, I advocate using it whenever possible to price your licenses. Others say it is untenable and that the license should be priced based on “value” and “creativity” and other nebulous terms.

Hey, I wish there was a better way, I really do, to determine an image’s value to a client, but the price of the media has been setting the value for advertising since advertising has been around. And, until we can find a better system (heavy on the word “system” there), this is the best I can figure.

How many of you know that the creative used to be free in advertising? Yup, early agencies made all of their money on their media commissions. They threw in the creative as a value-added service. Then they started marking up their outside costs and getting commissions. Then, one sad day, the media buying part of agencies started leaving the agencies.

Today, most agencies without media buying are still struggling to find the best way to price and bill their services. But the media companies still make lots of money selling media space. In fact, media companies are now giving away free creative for their clients as a value-added service (or doing it for cheap)–cutting the agencies out entirely.

So, it’s come full-circle; creative is being given away again but this time by the media companies.

The only constant? The selling of the media space.

So, that’s why I look to those numbers (which have generally remained constant or gone up over time, taking inflation into account–several economists see ad spending at or higher than GDP growth) as an effective constant upon which to base a pricing system. As I have said repeatedly, it isn’t a perfect system, but at least there is math and logic involved.