The Fair Tender is an initiative of the Association of Communication Agencies (AKA), which is based on long-term experience, not only from clients but also from agencies. It is a set of rules for better and fairer functioning of tenders. If companies follow these rules, they save time, energy and, most importantly, money for themselves and their agencies. What are these rules? Let’s give examples specifically for influencer marketing demand.
- Less is more
The fewer agencies involved, the less time spent on meetings and evaluations. It’s pretty clear up front who you’ll be approaching. In the case of an influencer marketing enquiry, you will probably include us and 2-3 other agencies in your selection. There really aren’t more of us out there. You will find the right agency by interesting case studies, or references from a similar segment in which you do business. So it’s a good idea to spend more time preparing before approaching specific agencies with a hyped up brief.
- Budget
The brief must include a budget. Leoš Mareš costs different money than Tonda who plants carrots. That’s why we need to know from the beginning what budget to work with in order to propose a solution adequate to the available finances. At WOO we do campaigns from 150,000,- for us this is the minimum budget where it is already worthwhile for the client to invest in the agency. If you have a smaller budget, we suggest going down the freelancer or intern route instead. Just have an experienced agency consult you on the steps. Only use an agency if you really care about the outcome and need to make influencer marketing a channel that will meet your goals. For example, we have run campaigns where we had over 200 influencers per month. That’s probably something few freelancers would give.
- Timing
We’ve cleared an influencer campaign in a matter of hours, but in the case of a tender, taking the time to build brand awareness, strategy or creative concept is the way to go. So a tender with a deadline of a week isn’t entirely fair. We spend an average of 150 hours on an influencer tender and involve over 10 agency specialists. So it’s nice to give them the space to think and also a fair playing field, which I’m sure we all deserve.
- A clear objective and selection criteria
This will make it easier to select winners and your reasons will be so easy to defend. You will find it easier to write the follow-up feedback, because agencies simply deserve it. Just please, no feedback along the lines of “Another agency offered a better solution.” Or “In the end, we chose another agency. Thank you.” Those are useless feedback. If we’ve gone to the trouble of doing your assignment, you go ahead and do it with feedback. We’re only human, and we shift based on client feedback.
- Decision Makers
Ideally, identify the responsible persons on both sides up front. Occasionally we find ourselves in a debrief meeting with someone who is not deciding the winner in a tender. That sucks. You also wouldn’t go on a date with a friend of the person you want to date.
- Formalities
We understand that multinationals need to deliver sometimes quite complicated looking documents in quite complicated looking systems as part of the selection process. We don’t have a problem with this, all we ask is that you ask for the bare minimum documents to start with, without which the potential winner would not be able to attend the selection process. Leave the remaining formalities for the winner (for a prize) at the end.
- Motivation
Finally, what is the best motivation for any hardworking team? The promise of future collaboration, which is also the biggest reward. Ideally signing a contract in blood for the next 30 years. But even 5 years is bearable.
And we’re adding an 8th point, and that’s presentation.
We probably all know the origin of this word, from the word present. It’s a bit unfortunate then if the client doesn’t realise this when the actual selection is made. In presentations we always try to follow the rules, as little text as possible and punchy and descriptive words, because we assume we will get the opportunity to present. PRESENTATION = PRESENT 🙂
Are you wondering what the ideal brief for a shortlist should look like for the agency you’re pitching influencer marketing to? We need to know the following basic information:
Send us a brief . Afterwards, you should expect at least a short debrief. We are usually insistent with this and we ask for it almost every time, even when everything is clear. There is nothing worse than working on something for two weeks and then finding out that we misunderstood at the very beginning. You probably know that.
