There's a tension that anyone who has ever tried to build or sell great creative work knows well.
On one side: the undeniable power of what agencies produce. Work that shifts behaviour. Builds culture. Transforms how people feel about a brand. Changes the trajectory of a business.
On the other: a commercial model built entirely around how long it took.
Utilisation. Ratecards. Hours. A spreadsheet that was never designed to capture the moment someone had the idea on the Tube.
Utilisation tells you one thing, whether someone was busy. It tells you nothing about whether the work will grow a business.
The gap between those two things is where most agency value disappears.
Pricing is not maths. It's a creative act.
Leland Maschmeyer, co-founder and CEO of COLLINS, put it better than most in a recent conversation with UNKNOWN.
"Pricing is not finance. It is not a ratecard exercise. It is the understanding of value, and an exchange so that value can be captured. It is about value communication, delivery, and capture."
His example: what's the difference between stretching and yoga? Fundamentally, the same thing. A heated room. Some movement. But yoga commands £80 a session with people queuing at the door. Stretching doesn't.
The context changed. The perceived value changed. The price changed.
Most agencies are selling stretching and calling it yoga. Some are selling yoga and charging for stretching.
The model was never built for this
The hourly rate made sense once. When agencies produced a contained set of outputs through a contained set of channels, pricing against time was at least defensible.
That world is mostly gone.
Clients don't buy time. They buy outcomes. And as automation makes execution faster and cheaper, as everyone gets access to the same platforms and models, the technology stops being the differentiator.
What's left is the idea. The thinking. The creative act itself.
And that has never been something you can put in a spreadsheet.
What better pricing actually looks like
There's no single answer. Different businesses have different pressures, different ambitions, different financial realities. But some structures are starting to work.
For long-term brand building partners: a consistent annual fee. No reconciliation. A defined team, a defined set of capabilities, and a creative relationship that compounds over time. Closer to a SaaS subscription than a project invoice.
For high-growth businesses with ambition but limited cash: equity. Creativity as a founding asset, not a cost line. Shared belief in the company's future. Shared upside when it succeeds.
For businesses focused on scale and expansion: growth-linked models. Fees tied to rollouts. Bonuses linked to penetration. Metrics aligned to the thing that actually matters, whether the business grew.
How to start
The honest answer: with one conversation you've been avoiding.
Not with the ratecard. Not with the pitch deck. With the CFO of a client you trust. Ask them what the work is actually worth to their business. Ask them what a ten percent increase in brand consideration means in revenue terms. Ask what they'd pay for certainty of outcome rather than a best effort.
The answers will surprise you.
Most agencies never ask those questions because they're afraid of what comes after. The renegotiation. The awkward client. The pitch they might lose.
But the alternative: continuing to under-price transformative work, burning teams on margins that don't sustain quality, watching the gap between the value you create and the value you capture widen every year is a higher cost over a longer period.
The industry doesn't need another iteration of the same model with better optics. It needs a rewrite.
Pricing is a creative act. Treat it like one.
UNKNOWN works with agency leaders on the commercial structures that unlock growth across talent, restructuring and M&A. If your pricing model isn't working, that's probably the right place to start the conversation.
.jpg)
