A brand will spend three months on a television campaign and pay the agency a retainer to do the thinking. The same brand will put the same money behind 50 creators and expect the thinking to come free with the 8-12 per cent. The resources are similar. The hours are more. The rent is the same. Only the invoicing is done differently. The revenue is lesser.

I have spent 16 years in this business, across mainline and social, and this is the part I find hardest to explain to anyone outside it.

The money has moved, and nobody disputes that. Budgets have shifted away from television and traditional media towards creators, vertical content and social. What has not moved is how agencies get paid for the work. Whether we are building a mainline campaign or a creator-led social one, the work still needs a strategy team, creative talent, a creator team, account management and platform expertise. Somebody still has to run it from getting the brief right to briefing all the teams, creators, etc correctly, ensuring delivery that matters. The cost of building that team and keeping it together doesn't fall just because the output is a Reel instead of a 30-second spot.

In traditional advertising, the commercial structure accounted for this. Agencies were paid for thinking and writing through retainers, and production carried its own economics. Imperfect, but it recognised that an agency has to keep people employed to deliver anything at all.

Social and creator marketing developed differently, mainly because the costs are visible. Creator fees are benchmarked. Production is easy to compare. A brand can see exactly where every rupee goes, and that is a good thing. I would not want to go back to the days when nobody could.

But one consequence of that visibility is that the agency fee has become a flat percentage of whatever the total budget happens to be. In 16 years, I have watched the basis for an agency fee shift from what a team costs to what a buy costs. In creator work, 8-12 per cent is now standard, and 5 per cent is not unusual. Only a few brands are happy to pay a thinking fee.

It is worth looking at what that percentage actually pays for. On a campaign with 50 creators, somebody has to shortlist and culturally vet every name, negotiate 50 sets of commercials, build a content approach that holds together across 50 very different voices, paper 50 contracts, coordinate 50 shoots, sit through several rounds of feedback on each one and track every deliverable through to publishing and reporting. That is weeks of senior time, not junior time. When it is priced as 10 per cent of a budget where most of the money is going to the creators themselves, the fee stops looking like payment for work and starts looking like a routing tax.

Now, the fair objection to all of this is that agencies have always found reasons to ask for more money, and that plenty of creator campaigns are genuinely lighter work. Both of those are true, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. A 10-creator amplification of an asset that already exists is not the same job as building a campaign from nothing, and it should not be priced as though it were. My argument is not that every fee is too low. It is that the size of the media budget tells you almost nothing about how much work there is. It is just the number that is easiest to calculate against. There are brands that already understand this and scope the fee to the job rather than the buy, and in my experience they get better work out of us for it.

The gap is widening because expectations keep rising. Brands now want social to behave like a brand-building engine and not a distribution channel. We are asked to understand culture, build creator ecosystems, develop platform-native ideas, produce at speed, and bring the same strategic rigour that has always been expected from a mainline agency.

All of that is people. People are the highest cost any agency carries.

So what should replace it? A few things already work. Fees can be scoped to the actual job, to team composition and time, the way a mainline retainer is, rather than derived from spend. Where a percentage stays, it can be tiered against the number of creators and rounds of content rather than the value of the buy, so that a 50-creator campaign is not priced like a five-creator one. Campaigns can carry a floor below which the work simply is not viable, and no reason cannot be said openly at the pitch stage. Strategy can sit separately from execution on the invoice, so that thinking is bought as thinking instead of being thrown in free. None of this asks brands to give up transparency. It asks for transparency about a more useful number.

Eventually this stops being an agency problem and becomes a brand problem. When work is underpriced consistently, an agency has only a few levers, and it pulls them. Smaller teams. Less senior involvement.

Less thinking per campaign. It looks like efficiency on a rate card, and 18 months later it looks like work that is competent rather than distinctive.

The creator economy has matured. Brands understand exactly what it can do to culture and to how people buy. The commercial model underneath it has not caught up. Fixing that does not mean every campaign has to get more expensive. If brands have moved their money, it is time the agency business rethought how it follows that money.

The author is COO, founder, a simple agency.