Hi Chuck...
I agree, it was a little confusing at first, but it's fairly clear and simple now... this guy simply wants you to serve as his advertising agency.
At minimum that would mean that you produce his spots, that you research the market, learn the market, establish a budget for him, determine how many GRP (gross ratings points) you want to try to hit for his shows, deal with all the media sales people, determine when and where his media buys take place, and place the commercials.
He would pay you for production, and he would pay you directly for the cost of the media placement. You would make your money from the production, and from the fact that although you are charging him the TV outlets' standard rates the TV stations and/or cable companies will be giving
you "agency rates" (usually 15% less) and you pocket the difference.
If he wants to take that a step up and have you serve as his full
full service agency, it would be all those things and a few more... it could extend to fully concepting/writing and implementing everything about all his campagins, not just TV but into a lot of other areas as well: radio, web, outdoor, newspaper, fleet graphics, displays, logos, signage, events, etc.
I don't know what your experience is, but although we don't really "talk it up" we have and do continue to do a lot of automotive work... we regularly do about 15 different dealerships throughout the southeast right now (some really good, some
really bad but hey, it pays the bills)... most of them do a new campaign every month but a few of them are less frequent than that. We try to steer away from the cheesy screamer stuff and
attempt to class it up a bit when we can. For example we just created a campaign for a dealer with high-end products (BMW, Porsche, Land Rover, Jag, etc.) and these spots are very copy light and free of heavy offers, all shot in black and white with a classical music track.... it remains to be seen if they work, but the client is very happy.
That being said, automotive advertising often "is what it is," and most of our car stuff would never "make the reel." In fact, our regular reel only has a couple of very high-end car spots on it, we keep a completely separate specific "automotive reel" for potential car clients that want to see it.
One thing to remember with automotive clients is that sometimes the money is a little slow. That's because much of automotive advertising is co-op... the dealer gets paid back a certain amount of his advertising cost (usually half) from the manufacturer (assuming you stick to all of the company's nit-picky rules... BMW and Volvo are especially tough sticklers). So in those cases the dealers often try to wait until they get the co-op money in hand before they pay
you. So often your net-30 invoice can turn into 60 or 90. And by the way, co-op generally applies
only to what you spend on media placement and not on production... so there is often the struggle with car dealers who might have
very big budgets (we've had dealers who have spent $100K a month on advertising) but still want to keep their actual production costs as low as possible since they have to foot all of that part of the bill. We usually try to convince them that it's better to spend part of their money to air a
better spot fewer and more targeted times, than to blow all of their money on media and wallpaper the airways with a
bad spot. We try to get our dealer clients to dedicate about 20% or so of their budgets to production costs, and put the rest on the air.
Good luck!
T2
__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com
