Marketing for Ad Agencies: The Free Idea

Anyone who took a flight in the nineties remembers the travel agent. You sat across his desk for an hour while he worked out the dates, the connection through Delhi, the hotel near the station and the cheaper fare if you left on a Tuesday. Then he handed you the tickets and charged you nothing for the hour. The airline paid him a commission, so the advice came free.

Then the airlines cut the commission, and travellers began to book for themselves. The advice had always been the valuable part. But nobody had ever paid for it, so nobody knew what it was worth, and a great many agents closed. The ones still in business charge for the planning itself: the honeymoon, the pilgrimage for fourteen relatives, the company's entire travel desk.

An advertising agency was built on the same arrangement. For decades the agency earned a commission on the media it booked, traditionally fifteen per cent, and the idea came along with it. The thinking was the sweetener. The space in the newspaper was the invoice.

That arrangement has mostly gone, and the habit it created has not. This article is about marketing for ad agencies: why the buyer still expects the idea for free, what the sales symptoms really point to, and how an agency puts a price on its thinking. If you came here asking how to get clients for an ad agency, this is my answer. It starts a step before the usual list of tactics.

Why the Idea Became Free

Three things keep the idea free long after the commission that paid for it has shrunk.

The media has moved out. Large advertisers buy media through specialist media agencies. Smaller ones book directly on the platforms, with a card and a login. The newspaper and the outdoor contractor will happily deal with the client's own team. So the part of the business that once carried the fee now sits somewhere else, and the creative agency is left holding the part that was always given away.

The idea cannot be inspected before it runs. A buyer cannot tell a good campaign from an ordinary one on a slide. So they ask to see several, from several agencies, and choose the one they like. That is the pitch. It is the travel agent's free hour, with five agents in the room and one ticket to be sold.

After it runs, the result has many parents. Sales went up. Was it the film, the festive season, the new distributor or the price cut? Nobody can say for certain, which means nobody can say what the idea was worth. Anything whose worth cannot be shown gets negotiated on what can be counted: number of films, number of adaptations, people on the account.

Put together, you have a buyer who believes ideas are what agencies do to win the work, and execution is what they are paid for. The buyer is not being unfair. They learnt this from the agencies themselves, over fifty years.

Why Ad Agencies Pitch for Free and Lose on Price

The sales symptoms will be familiar to most people who run an advertising agency.

• The six-agency pitch. Three weeks of the best people's time, a full campaign with scripts and layouts, and no fee.
• "We loved your idea." Followed by silence, and then something rather like it appearing a few months later, made by somebody cheaper.
• The retainer argued by headcount. How many people, at what level, for how many hours. The idea does not appear in the spreadsheet at all.
• The client who leaves after the first campaign. One launch, one polite review, one new agency.
• Three accounts that pay most of the salaries. It feels stable until one of them calls a review.
• The new marketing head. She arrives with an agency she trusts from her last job, and yours is suddenly "the incumbent".

These look like sales problems. A sharper pitch, a tougher negotiation, a better credentials deck. They are usually marketing problems, and the cause sits on the agency's own website.

Open ten of them. You will read "a full-service integrated advertising agency", see a wall of client logos and a showreel, and find a list: print, outdoor, radio, films, digital, events. I once asked the founder of a B2B advertising and outdoor-media agency to tell me what he sold, in two sentences, as if we had never met. What came back was the menu. Hoardings, digital, the whole campaign if required. Twelve years of good work, and he could not finish the sentence. The full story is in one campaign a stranger could buy.

He had never needed to finish it, because every client had come through someone who already trusted him. Trust does not ask what you sell. A stranger does.

There is an irony here that agency people enjoy when it is pointed out gently. Every agency has told a client that an ad with five messages is an ad with none. Then it writes its own homepage.

A buyer who cannot tell four agencies apart does the sensible thing and makes them audition. The free pitch is what a buyer asks for when the agency's marketing has given them no other way to choose. I describe the wider pattern in the guide to lead generation for marketing agencies, which is the parent of this article.

A Position Past "Full-Service Advertising Agency"

"Full service" describes the kitchen. It tells the buyer what you are able to cook and nothing about what you are known for.

A medium is not a position either. "We do outdoor" and "we do films" matter to a buyer who has already decided what they want, which puts you back in the rate comparison.

An agency can narrow in three ways.

• By sector. "Advertising for regional food and consumer brands." "Campaigns for schools and colleges in admission season." "Launch advertising for residential projects."
• By problem. "Taking a brand into a new state, in the language of that state." "Bringing footfall to a retail chain with thirty outlets." "Making an industrial company known to buyers who have never heard of it."
• By buying moment. "The launch or relaunch of one product in one or two cities." "The first proper campaign after a funding round."

The agency I mentioned chose the last kind. It gave up "any business that needs advertising" and chose regional consumer brands launching or relaunching a product in one or two cities. That did two useful things. It gave the founder a sentence a stranger could repeat. And it gave him a buying moment he could see coming, because a launch is a date on somebody's calendar and people talk about it months ahead.

There is a quieter benefit. An agency that has run fifteen launches for regional brands knows things no brief contains. It knows which week the distributors need the material, why the hoarding near the wholesale market matters more than the one on the flyover, and what the owner's family will say about the film. That knowledge changes the first meeting from "show us some ideas" to "here is what usually goes wrong in a launch, and when". Nobody asks for that conversation from six agencies at once.

Founders worry that narrowing means turning work away. It does not. You can still take the account that walks in. You are choosing what you are known for. The method is in positioning for consulting firms, and how to make the difference visible is in how to differentiate a B2B services firm.

One Campaign a Stranger Could Buy

A capability list is a kitchen. An offer is a dish on the menu. Nobody walks in and orders a kitchen.

So the second job, after the position, is to turn the list into one thing a stranger can understand and buy. In that agency we collapsed everything into a single campaign for a single launch. One fixed scope and one fixed fee. A creative concept, a channel plan, three placements and the management of launch week, with revisions bounded in writing and a hard end date. The founder's line changed from "we can do your advertising" to "we build and run your launch campaign".

Three things followed. A stranger could say yes without a month of proposals. The fee was attached to the whole campaign, so the idea was inside the price for the first time. And the end date stopped the work sliding into the open-ended retainer that had been eating the margin. Clients whose launch went well were then offered ongoing work. Strangers bought the campaign, and proven clients moved on to the retainer. The thinking behind this is in how to productise your service, and the fee side is in value-based pricing for consultants.

Now the pitch itself. The buyer's wish to see your thinking before a large commitment is fair. The free campaign is the wrong answer to it, because it is a guess made without a proper brief, judged on whether the room liked the film. A better answer is a small paid first step.

• A working session with the owner and the sales head, not only the marketing team.
• A few conversations with dealers or customers.
• A written brief: who the campaign is for, the one thing it has to make them believe, and what it should not attempt.

Two weeks or so, a fixed fee, and a document the client can use whichever agency makes the campaign. Most clients have never had a brief that good, and the agency that wrote it rarely has to audition afterwards.

Will every buyer accept this? No. Some will insist on the free pitch, and now and then you will choose to do one. The point is to have another door to offer, and to pitch because you decided to.

One more thing has to change, and it is the showreel. A reel proves the agency can make films, which every agency on the list can do. Write the work up as a case instead: the business situation, what you found, the idea and why you chose it over the others, and what changed afterwards in plain words. In India most clients will not want their figures published, and you do not need them. "The dealers started asking for the stock before the sales team called" will persuade more people than a percentage nobody can check. Twelve years in, the agency in my story did not have one case written this way. So it sold the new campaign to people who already knew it first, and treated each one as a case to be written.

Why Ad Clients Leave After the First Campaign

Winning the account is half of the subject. An agency that loses a third of its clients every year needs a great deal of new business simply to stand still, and most of the effort that goes into pitching would be better spent on keeping.

Clients leave for four reasons, and poor work is rarely the first.

Nobody agreed what the campaign was for. If success was never written down, it gets decided afterwards, by last month's sales figure or by the chairman's opinion of the film.

The pitch team disappeared. The seniors won the account and the juniors run it. The client notices in the second month.

The agency is a pair of hands. I worked with an ad-creative agency that lived on a few large clients. They arrived with a marketing team and a finished brief, and the agency executed it well. It was pleasant work, and it was also replaceable work, because the thinking had never lived with the agency. Any capable studio could be swapped in. That story is in from a few big clients to many small ones.

The person who chose you has moved on. The relationship was with one marketing head, and it left with her.

The remedy is to set expectations that survive a bad month, and to set them before the campaign runs.

• Write down what the advertising can and cannot do. It can make people aware and curious. It cannot repair a price that is too high or a product that is not on the shelf. Say this at the start, when it sounds like honesty. Said after a bad month, it sounds like an excuse.
• Agree what you will watch, and for how long. Enquiries, dealer calls, walk-ins, searches for the brand name. Agree also that one month proves very little.
• Predict the bad month. There will be one. Tell the client so in the first meeting, and say what you will do when it comes.
• Send one page a month in the owner's language. What ran, what happened, what you would change. No media jargon.
• Know more than one person. The owner or the business head should know your name and your thinking, and not only your invoices.

That same ad-creative agency learnt something else when it went looking for smaller clients. A large company buys one part of the process, because it owns the rest. A small or mid-sized business owns none of it. It is buying the thinking, the plan, the creative and the customers at the end. The agency that takes on that whole job is much harder to replace. I should add that this was a change to how the agency operated, and no change of wording would have done it. Better marketing would not have fixed it, and I said so at the time.

A client who stays does three things for you. They pay next month. They give you a case worth writing. And they recommend you to other people, with a story to tell. A good reputation is mostly kept clients, talking.

Where Ad Agency Clients Come From in India

Look for buyers at a moment of change. The hardest client to win is one who is content with the present agency.

• A launch or a relaunch, with a date attached.
• A brand entering a new state or a new language.
• A new marketing head, or a founder's son or daughter taking over the brand.
• A funding round, with money set aside to become known.
• The months before the festive season, when plans are made.
• A competitor who has suddenly become loud.

Most of these can be seen from outside, and that shapes where ad agency clients come from.

Past clients, and people who have moved. Marketing heads change companies, and they take their agencies with them. A short, useful note twice a year to everyone you have worked with is the cheapest new business there is.

Partners who are in the room first. Media owners and outdoor contractors hear about a launch early. So do the specialists either side of you. A branding agency finishes an identity that then has to be advertised, and I have written for them in marketing for branding agencies. A digital agency often needs a bigger idea than a month of posts; see marketing for digital marketing agencies. A web studio builds the page your campaign will send people to, which is the subject of marketing for web design agencies. Add PR firms and production houses.

The founder's writing. The agency in my first story published a short "launch readiness" teardown that the founder could share freely. Prospects arrived having already spent time inside his thinking. Buyers trust a person before a firm, and the balance between the two names is in founder brand vs company brand.

Search, for your focus. "Advertising agency in Bangalore" is crowded and brings people collecting quotations. "Advertising agency for real estate launches" is small and full of intent. SEO for consultants explains the approach.

Outbound tied to something you can see. A dealer advertisement in a new city, a job posting for a brand manager, a news item about a new plant. A note that begins with their launch gets read. A credentials deck does not. See cold outreach for consultants.

Overseas and white-label work. Some Indian agencies produce for agencies abroad. It is steady, and it can pay the salaries. The agency abroad holds the client and you hold the task list, so treat it as a base and not as a position.

What works badly: answering every open pitch; tenders and empanelments decided on the lowest bid; "top advertising agencies" directories; and credentials decks sent in bulk to a bought list.

A New-Business Routine That Survives Pitch Season

In most agencies new business has two speeds. Nothing happens for months. Then a pitch arrives and the whole office works on it till midnight for three weeks. Whether it is won or lost, everyone is too tired to do anything else, and the calm returns.

The cause is arithmetic. Selling and delivery compete for the same few senior people, so the selling stops when the agency is busiest. I go through the mechanics in stop relying on referrals.

The answer is a routine small enough to survive a pitch.

• One observation a week, published where your buyers already look. A campaign you admired and why it worked. A launch that went wrong and what you would have done.
• Five conversations a week with past clients, partners and marketing heads who have changed jobs. A useful note, not a pitch.
• One written case a quarter, from work already delivered.
• Fifteen minutes every Monday on each open conversation: what happens next, and who does it.
• A written rule for pitches. Four questions before you say yes. Is there a real brief? How many agencies are in it? Will we meet the person who decides? Is the present agency also pitching? Two bad answers, and you decline or offer the paid brief instead.

Give the routine an owner who is not the founder. The founder still holds the conversations. Someone else keeps the list and the calendar, and asks on Monday what happened. It comes to three or four hours a week. That looks too small to matter. It matters because it does not stop. The wider system is in the guide to getting clients beyond referrals, and B2B brand awareness without an ad budget shows how far this goes before an agency spends anything on advertising itself. (Yes, I see the irony.)

What Marketing Consulting for an Ad Agency Looks Like

A fair question: what would a marketing consultant do for a firm that makes other people's marketing?

I am not going to write your ads. What an outsider brings is what you bring to your own clients, which is a view from the street. You cannot read your own hoarding from inside the building.

I start with a diagnosis, not a plan. The Pipeline Reality Check is a one-week look at where your work really comes from: the last ten or twenty clients, who sent them, what each one bought, which pitches were lost and what the buyer said afterwards. Founders are often surprised by the list once it sits in one place.

Sometimes the constraint is not marketing. If the agency is built to fulfil briefs and the clients it wants need the whole job done, more enquiries will make things worse. I will say so.

When it is marketing, the work follows the CLEAR method: who the agency is for, the message that makes that obvious, one offer a stranger can buy, the one or two channels worth your time, and a weekly rhythm the team runs without me. Each engagement is scoped after a conversation. If you are weighing up whether an outside advisor makes sense at all, I have written about that in marketing consultant for agencies.

Questions Ad Agency Founders Ask Me

How do ad agencies get clients?

Most get them through introductions, repeat work and marketing heads who move companies and take the agency along. The agencies that grow steadily add three things: a position narrow enough for a stranger to remember, one clearly scoped campaign offer, and cases that show what the advertising changed for the business. Partners, search and outreach all work better once those exist.

How do I get clients for an ad agency in India?

Start with the people who already know your work, including past clients and the people who have left those companies. Then look for brands at a moment of change: a launch, a new state, a new marketing head, the run-up to the festive season. Build relationships with media owners, branding agencies and digital agencies, who hear about those moments before you do.

Should an ad agency pitch for free?

Sometimes, and by decision. A free pitch makes sense when there is a real brief, a short list, access to the person who decides and a client you very much want. Otherwise offer a small paid first step, such as a written campaign brief. It meets the buyer's real need, which is to see how you think, and it filters for people who are serious.

What is the fastest way to get clients for an ad agency?

Write to the people who already trust you. Past clients, lapsed clients and marketing heads who have changed jobs will answer within the week, and no new channel is as quick. The slower work of a position and an offer is what makes the next stranger easier to win. Do the first this month and begin the second alongside it.

An Ad Agency Giving the Idea Away?

The buyer who asks for a free pitch is not being unreasonable. They were taught, by the old commission, that ideas come with the booking. Unteaching it is a marketing job: a position of your own, one campaign a stranger can buy, a paid brief before the pitch, expectations that survive a bad month, and a small routine that carries on through pitch season. The travel agents who are still in business did the same thing. They found the part of the hour that was worth paying for, and they put a name on it.

An ad agency giving the idea away? Get in touch. Tell me where your last ten clients came from, and I will tell you honestly whether the fix is marketing, and what I would look at first. If it needs a closer look, the usual first step is the Pipeline Reality Check, a one-week diagnosis of where your new business really comes from.