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I have long held the notion that the traditional “make a percentage of spend” model was the most counter-intuitive way of structuring a media-buying campaign to be efficient. Imagine giving your sales staff a bonus %, of whatever they expense. A policy that’d probably axed after their first luxury yacht rental in Monaco?

So what’s the ideal model or hybrid? The sweet spot obviously varies, but current mutually-beneficial campaigns seem to work best with a few things in place:

- a consultancy/retainer for general expertise and cost of doing business to cover the agency/media buyers in the event of cancelled or short-run campaigns

- fair and agreed upon baseline numbers, relative to both comparative industry and the specific product or service’s fit within that market (newly launched entities always take some time to catch and stick).

- a sliding scale of realistic targets; performance-based incentives for the agency to put inventive, “A-team” ideas in place. Else, run the risk of auto-pilot’ed campaigns with which could ambitiously be average at best.

There are a great many creative hybrids which deviate from these tenets with great success, but they are usually contingent on a mutual trust and an unwavering two-party confidence in the business/product/service being sold or exposed.

iMediaConnection’s Tom Hespos expounds on the topic further here.