If I buy a bottle of wine for £3.99, I know that the quality isn’t going to be that great. In fact, if recent news is anything to go by, it will probably contain arsenic.
If creative services are bought purely on price, you can bet your boots you’ll be left with a bad taste too. Everyone knows it. But not everyone avoids the trap. Just look at the number of crowdsourced logo design websites out there. There’s a market for cheap design, but there’s also a market for good design. Now these two forces, which should operate in different stratospheres, are colliding in a price war that is undervaluing designers and forcing them to sacrifice their best work for their best price.
Procurement departments will always attempt to squeeze the bottom line – to push the penny further. It’s their job. But how do you put a price on creativity? Can we make this process easier? Should we charge hourly, daily or estimate with a project rate? What if we charged for design and creative services by the mouse click?
Imagine how much easier it would be for the procurement bods if creativity could be nicely bundled into 5,000 or 10,000 click tariffs. Imagine the amount of time the creative agencies would save without having to work up detailed budgets.
No longer would clients have to worry about day rates or spiralling project fees; they would get exactly what they paid for in a way many seem to value creative services: mouse clicks.
Imagine the phone conversation: “A logo design? … 4,000 clicks please … Yes, of course you can purchase extra click bundles for rollout.”
Account managers would be replaced by count managers, carefully watching those click-happy designers and the number of mouses being tapped. Savvier designers would use more keyboard shortcuts, speeding up the time spent on a project, again saving those precious clicks. Any clicks not used could roll over to the next job.
The client might even have a real-time click counter on their desktops to keep an eye out for liberal click usage.
It may sound crazy – and, of course, it is. But this is what it’s coming to. Creativity isn’t valued as it should be; it’s seen as a few clicks of a mouse and nothing more. If you want to play it that way then you will get what you pay for.
Rob Pratt is design director at Brand & Deliver
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