Retainer, project or performance — pick the commercial model on purpose

Agencies talk about partnerships. Invoices talk about models. A retainer, a project and a performance arrangement are not three ways to pay for the same thing. They are three ways to train a team — yours and theirs — to behave. If you pick the model because it felt modern in the pitch, you will spend the year arguing about timesheets, variations or a number nobody trusts.

This is a working together piece. The dollars sit in what Australian agencies actually charge. Read that for bands. Read this for the shape of the deal.

What a retainer is actually buying

A retainer buys capacity and memory. The shop keeps people who already know the brand, the legal line, the retail calendar and the person in finance who will query the invoice. You are paying for the right to interrupt them, and for them to still be there when the interruption is dull.

That is a good buy when the work is always on: media, search, social, a content desk, CRO that never really ends. It is a poor buy when you have a single job with an end — a site, a brand platform, a launch — and you are using a monthly to avoid writing a brief. You will get a monthly meeting. You may not get the job.

Retainers go bad in two opposite ways. The shop under-serves and hides in reporting. Or the client treats the retainer as an infinite helpdesk and then resents the variation when the helpdesk is a campaign. Both failures are design failures. Write the capacity. Write what happens when you exceed it. Write the notice either side must give.

Ask who the hours belong to. A “strategic retainer” with no named people is a subscription to a logo. A timesheeted retainer can be honest and still become a fight if every Slack message is a unit. The adult version is a scope you can inspect and a monthly that says what was traded, not a performance of busyness.

What a project is actually buying

A project buys a result with a boundary: a thing that can be shown, launched or decided. The fee is a bet that both sides understand the boundary. When they do, projects are the cleanest Australian commercial relationship. When they do not, they are retainers with worse manners.

Projects suit work with a beginning and an end. A rebuild. A campaign. A measurement implementation. A piece of research that should change a decision. They also suit a first engagement with a shop you do not yet trust with a twelve-month monthly.

The failure mode is the open mouth. “Phase two” appears because phase one was priced to win. Or the client adds stakeholders after the kick-off and is surprised the date moved. Or the shop treats every new fact as a variation, including facts they should have asked for in discovery.

Write acceptance. What “done” looks like, who says so, and what happens to unused ideas. Write the change process before you need it. Write who owns the files on the day the project ends. A project with no handover is how you rent a brain and then forget the password.

If the project is really a trial for a retainer, say that. Shops will staff a trial differently if they know what winning looks like. Clients will brief differently if they know they are not yet married.

What “performance” is actually buying

Performance commercial models sell alignment. You pay more if a number moves. The shop takes risk. Everyone is a partner. Sometimes that is true. Often the number is a platform metric the shop can influence by changing the window, the audience or the definition of a conversion.

A performance fee can be honest when the outcome is cash you can audit, the baseline is known, the offer is stable, and neither side can quietly retune the tracking. Those conditions are rarer than pitch decks imply. Australian retail with a clean offer and a short cycle can get close. A long B2B sale with five influences on the path cannot.

This desk will not invent a ROAS to make a kicker look reasonable. If a shop proposes one, ask for the last twelve months of the same number, produced the same way, before they arrived. Ask who owns the analytics property. Ask what happens if you change price, stock or the landing page — all of which you should be free to do.

Hybrid models — a lower fee plus a kicker — are common. They can reduce the shop’s incentive to hoard hours. They can also reduce the shop’s incentive to tell you the offer is the problem, because the kicker is easier to chase with media than with a difficult conversation.

If the only way the shop will take the account is a kicker you cannot audit, you are not buying alignment. You are buying a story that will be hard to end. Ending is when and how to fire your agency. Think about the exit while the term sheet still has white space.

How the model changes the weekly

On a retainer, the weekly is a queue. What did we ship, what is blocked, what will we drop if something urgent arrives. If you cannot drop anything, you do not have a retainer. You have a backlog and a polite fiction.

On a project, the weekly is a critical path. Decisions, dependencies, the date. A project weekly that turns into a tour of “opportunities” is a shop fishing for phase two, or a client who is lonely.

On a performance deal, the weekly is an argument about the number. That can be healthy if the number is real. It is corrosive if every meeting is a defence of attribution. You will stop talking about the work.

Pick the meeting you are willing to sit in for a year.

Mixing models without paying twice

Australian marketers often need more than one shape. Always-on media wants a retainer. The Christmas campaign wants a project. A risky new channel might deserve a small kicker if you can define it.

Write the join. Which meetings are in which fee. Which people can be called for which job. What happens when the campaign creative is late and the media retainer sits idle. What happens when the project team wants to “just tweak” the always-on account.

A common mess is paying a monthly for “strategy” and a project for “execution”, then discovering strategy was a slide and execution was the whole job. Another is a performance kicker on media while a separate creative project is judged on fame. The teams will optimise for their invoice.

If you cannot describe the join in a page, buy one model and fewer shops.

Questions that belong in the commercial conversation

Ask the shop which model they prefer when they are the client. The pause is informative.

Ask to see a redacted invoice and a scope from a similar account — not a case study, an invoice. You are looking for how they bill the dull month.

Ask what they do when the client is the bottleneck. A project shop that cannot say “we stopped the clock” will either eat the cost or resent you. A retainer shop that cannot say “we used the hours on X instead” will invent activity.

Ask how they price the brief you wrote, not the package with a name. Writing a brief agencies will actually read is the input. A shop that answers with a productised tier has told you they sell slices.

Ask about notice, data and IP in the same conversation as the fee. The model you choose should still make sense on the day you are angry.

The desk’s view

Use a retainer when you need the same people next month. Use a project when you need a boundary. Use a performance kicker only when you can audit the number without asking the shop for permission. Write the model in verbs — ship, decide, share — not in the word partnership.

If a proposal uses all three words and none of the mechanics, it is a pitch. Pitch decks are free. Models are how you spend the year.