How to read an agency proposal

Read a proposal the way you would read a lease. The photographs are for mood. The clauses are for living. Agencies know this, which is why the insights come first and the termination sentence sits in eight-point type on page 28.

If you sent a real brief — and if you did not, go back to writing a brief agencies will actually read — the proposal has one job: to show how this shop would do that job, with which people, for what money, on what terms. Everything else is sales. Sales is allowed. It is not evidence.

This is the companion to choosing an agency. The meeting is theatre. The document is what you can hold someone to.

Treat it as a sales document

A good proposal is still trying to win. That does not make it dishonest. It does mean the sequence is designed to create agreement before you reach the price. You can read it in any order. Start at the back.

Look for a commercial summary, a team list, a scope, a term, and a measurement section. If any of those is missing, you have a capability brochure with your logo on the cover. Ask for the missing pages before a second meeting.

Ignore, on the first pass, the market “context” that could have been written for any mid-market Australian brand: privacy changes, rising media costs, the need to be customer-centric. You already live here. You do not need a shop to discover iOS or the ACCC.

Skip the theatre until the commercials hold

Turn to the fee. Write it on a pad as four lines: labour, GST, media, everything else. “Everything else” is where licences, production, stock, travel, call tracking and “tech stack” go to hide.

Ask whether the retainer is exclusive of GST. In this country it almost always is. A $10,000 line becomes $11,000 on the invoice. Ask whether media is passed through at cost, marked up, or billed as a management percentage. A 15 per cent media fee on a $40,000 spend is a second retainer that never appeared in the hero number. Our ranges sit in what Australian agencies actually charge; use them as a smell test, not a ceiling.

Then read the term. Start date, initial period, notice, auto-renewal. A twelve-month term with ninety days’ notice means you are deciding in month nine whether to keep them. That can be reasonable for SEO. It is a poor fit for a three-month offer test.

Change requests belong in this pass too. “Out of scope will be quoted” is fine. “Out of scope includes anything not listed in appendix B” is how a weekly social post becomes a variation. Count the hours implied by the scope. A content calendar, two campaigns, a landing-page program and “ongoing CRO” is not a $6,000 month unless someone junior is doing all of it.

Strategy that could only be yours

Now read the strategy pages, and apply a simple test: could this paragraph be pasted into a proposal for a competitor in the same category with three nouns swapped? If yes, it is a template. Templates are not a sin. They are not a reason to pay a strategist’s rate.

What you want is a diagnosis of your constraint. The page that does not convert. The offer sales cannot explain. The category term you do not own. The list you cannot legally email. The product feed that breaks every Tuesday. A shop that has read the brief will argue with it in at least one place. Agreement on every line is a warning.

Be wary of invented precision. No ethical shop can promise a ROAS from a distance, on a file they have not audited, with a creative they have not made. If a number appears in the strategy section, ask what input would change it and what happens if the number is missed. “We will optimise” is not an answer.

Paid media proposals should name platforms and the reason, not a funnel diagram. If search is the job, the page should survive a read from someone who lives on the SEM agencies desk: match types are gone, brand terms are a political fight, and shopping feeds are work. If the proposal cannot talk that way, the strategy was written by the new-business team.

The team slide is the price

Names, days, seniority. Not a wall of faces from the about page.

Translate titles. A “growth partner” is often an account director with a quota. A “specialist” may be a contractor. A “pod” may be two people and a freelancer. Ask for the expected hours on your account in a normal month, and what happens when a senior person is on leave or on a pitch.

The person who presented is not the team. Write down who you met and who is in the document. If they differ, the proposal is already negotiating against the meeting. Offshore hours are acceptable when they are named, costed, and kept away from customer records you have not cleared. Hidden hours are a quality problem and, if personal information travels, a privacy problem.

A proposal that will not name people until “we have won the business” is a lottery ticket. One or two roles can stay TBC. A blank roster cannot.

GST, media, mark-up and the eight-point type

Read the payment schedule as cash flow. Seven-day media terms mean you are the agency’s bank. Prepayment of a quarter looks tidy in a deck and ugly if you exit in week six. Align invoices to the financial year if the first year straddles 30 June.

Look for exclusivity, non-solicit, and IP. You should own the finished work you paid for, the ad accounts, and the data collected on your watch. They can keep their tools, frameworks and unused concepts. If they want a licence back to show the work, that is normal. If they want to keep the Facebook page, that is not.

Testimonials and case claims in the appendix are marketing. Australian Consumer Law still applies to how they describe results to you. You do not need to police their other clients. You do need to refuse a guarantee they cannot control.

Measurement, and who keeps the keys

The measurement section should name the source of truth, the lag, and the number that matches page one of your brief. If you briefed pipeline and they proposed session growth, they did not read the brief. If they proposed a dashboard you cannot log into, you are buying a PDF.

Write down, as you read:

• Who is admin on Google Ads, Meta, GA4, Tag Manager, Search Console and the shop front.
• Whether conversion tracking exists, or whether month one is a rebuild billed as strategy.
• How they treat consent, identity and list use. Lookalike audiences built from a file with shaky permission are your ACMA and OAIC problem.
• What happens to historical data if you leave.

If those sentences are absent, add them as conditions of acceptance. Do not wait for the lawyers to invent them from silence.

Comparing three proposals without lying to yourself

Do not score chemistry, design and “cultural fit” on a spreadsheet and then pretend the highest number won. Those scores exist to launder a gut feel.

Compare, on one page: outcome they accepted, team you would get, monthly labour cost inclusive of GST, media treatment, term and notice, account ownership, and the first ninety-day plan. Everything else is colour. A cheaper proposal that dumps the work on a junior is not cheaper. An expensive proposal that names two seniors for a day a week may be.

If the three answers are interchangeable, your brief was mush, or you longlisted three shops that sell the same product. Either way, another meeting will not fix it.

Questions that puncture a deck

Use the presentation to test the document, not to watch it again.

Ask them to walk the commercial summary without the slides. Ask who is in the Tuesday meeting in week six. Ask which line of their strategy they would drop if the budget were cut by 20 per cent. Ask what they will do if the tracking is dirtier than the brief admitted. Ask when they last lost an account like yours, and why.

Then ask the exit question while everyone is still polite: if we give notice on day ninety, what do we keep, what do you invoice, and who presses pause? Shops that have done this cleanly will answer in a minute. The others will talk about partnership. Read when and how to fire your agency before you need the clause.

The insights slide is optional. The termination sentence is not.

What belongs in the MSA

Acceptance of a proposal is not a contract. The MSA is where those promises either become obligations or quietly die.

Lift the named team, the scope, the ninety-day plan, account and data ownership, GST treatment, media terms, and notice period into the agreement. If a promise only exists in slide copy, it does not exist. Do not sign a twelve-month term against a proposal that still says “team TBC”.

You are not buying a relationship. You are buying labour, judgement and a set of logins, under Australian law, on a timetable that has to survive your financial year. Read it that way and the costume falls off.