There are two dates in the quote I wrote this morning. One is the day after we start. The other is four days after that, and it is the one that matters, because on that day the client gets to tell us to stop.
What is actually in it
A client launching a health and wellbeing concept wants to start advertising on paid social. Six hours in total. Four to set up the ad account, hand the tracking pixel to their web developers, and build the first campaign with its targeting. Two for follow-up.
The follow-up is the part I want to talk about. We check in briefly after one day, mostly to confirm nothing is obviously broken. Then we check in again after four days, and that one is with the client. At that second check-in we decide one of three things: keep going as we are, optimise further, or stop. Stop is written down, in the quote, carrying the same weight as the other two.
Why write it down
Because if it is not written down it does not happen. Have you ever had a client call you in February to say that the campaign you launched in December probably is not doing much, so should we switch it off?
I have not, and it is not because clients are careless. They have other things to do and they assume we are watching. Nor do we raise it, if I am honest about it - the campaign is running, it is being invoiced, and nobody has a particular reason to go and look. So it runs for another six months, and then somebody sits down and asks what exactly they got for the money.
A date in the quote solves this in a slightly stupid, entirely effective way. The fourth day arrives, it is already in the calendar, and there is a conversation that has to happen. The client knew about it in advance, so choosing to stop does not feel like a failure. It is just one of three boxes.
I do not think this is mainly a favour to the client, though. It is a favour to us. An engagement that ends on time with a clear decision is far easier to come back to than one that fades out over six months of silence and then ends badly. We have had both kinds, and it is not close.
The other small line
Elsewhere in the quote there is a line that looks like nothing: we suggest the client put their own card into the ad platform and pay the media budget directly.
It is simpler that way and it avoids unnecessary cost. But it is also a position. Agencies can front a client’s media budget and re-invoice it, sometimes with a margin on top, and at that point it quietly becomes interesting to the agency that the budget is large. I do not want that link anywhere near my engagements. If we make money when the client spends more, then sooner or later we will find ourselves believing the client should spend more, and at that point we are not much of an adviser.
There are practical reasons as well, of course (we are not out of pocket, and the client is not left wondering which part of the invoice is fee and which is media), but that is not why the line is there.
It does make our invoices smaller. I am aware of that.
Small enough to be told no
There is a pricing argument underneath all of this that I have only recently got clear in my own head.
If the first engagement is large, the client cannot really afford to end it at the first review, because ending it means admitting to somebody internally that a meaningful budget produced nothing. So they do not end it. They extend it, quietly, hoping it turns. That is bad for them and, less obviously, bad for us - we end up carrying an engagement that everybody privately suspects is not working, which is about the worst thing you can have on your books.
Six hours is small enough that stopping costs nobody their credibility. Nobody has to defend it. That is not me being generous with our pricing - it is me trying to make the review honest, because a review the client cannot afford to fail is not a review at all.
Regarding what comes after - if it does work, the second engagement can be whatever it needs to be. Earning that is the point.
What I do not know
Whether the concept works. We may well sit there on the fourth day and conclude that it is not landing, in which case the client has spent six hours and a small media budget to find that out. I think that is a good deal for the client. I am less sure every client experiences it that way in the moment.
What I have noticed is that the clients who stay are almost always the ones who started with something small and tightly bounded, where they could see exactly what they got. The ones who ended up disappointed are more often those who bought something large and vague from us and then could not point at what it produced. We have been worse at the first kind than we should have been, and this is an attempt to be better.
So the stop decision goes in. It still feels faintly backwards to sell an engagement and book, in the same document, the moment the client is invited to end it.
How do you handle it? Do you put a review in where one of the outcomes is switching it off - or is that just me?