Should he cut his losses and just go with the free legal representation the state will provide or pay for the best lawyer he can afford?
Most people would agree that when times are rough you need the best advice you can get, and the price you pay for it should not be a deciding factor.
Unfortunately, many advertisers don't think like that. Is that really a sensible thing to do in rough times?
Most clients spend roughly three per cent of their total sales revenue on advertising - not on advertising agencies, but on producing and running advertising. Traditionally, agencies used to receive 15 per cent of that for their services - typically, therefore, the cost of an agency's services constitute 0.45 per cent of a company's total sales revenue. If a client squeezes an agency down to 12 per cent, they've just reduced the cost of the agency service to 0.36 per cent - a saving of 0.09 per cent against sales revenue. By any standards, that's a pretty pitiful saving.
And at what cost is that saving generated?
First of all, agencies are businesses too - when they lose 25 per cent of their revenue, they need to lose 25 per cent of their costs as well.
Which usually means that people get fired. 'Too bad' most clients would say, 'but that's life'.
However, when revenue on an account drops 25 per cent, it becomes difficult for the agency to maintain resources on the business - it becomes especially hard to allocate the time of senior members to the business.
So it's the client who suffers. When it becomes insufferable, the client calls for an agency review and appoints a new agency. Which would seem like a happy ending except that every time a client switches agencies, it takes a few months for things to settle down, for people to truly understand the brand and start to make a real contribution - so the client continues to suffer anyway.
Is all of that worth a saving of 0.09 per cent? You decide. Would the man on trial for his life waste his time arguing about lawyer's fees?
Or would he try and motivate the lawyer by offering a huge bonus if he escapes the death penalty?
Similarly, it would make sense for clients to pay agencies a fee, and build in incentives and bonuses based on the quality of their output or the achievement of predefined goals.
Most people think advertising people are well off, making a commission regardless of the fortunes of their clients. In reality, the fact that agencies don't make a direct financial benefit from the success of most of the brands they build probably deprives them of a large source of revenue.
It also deprives clients of the opportunity of fully tapping the energy, enthusiasm and intellectual power of their agencies as partners in building brands.
