Latest News > Media Release

02 August 2011

AANA surveys agency remuneration practices

As a part of a global initiative, AANA will undertake the first major survey of Australian industry standards around agency remuneration.

The survey will delve into all facets of agency remuneration, including:

the most common methods by which different agencies are remunerated ;
the main basis for agency incentive remuneration programs and their effectiveness ;
how often agency remuneration negotiations typically occur; and
the contributing factors for any significant changes in agency remuneration agreements

"When it comes to remunerating agencies, advertisers can choose from a variety of compensation models from commissions to fixed retainers to labour-based and value-based fees, or a combination of options,” said AANA CEO, Scott McClellan. “The increasing fragmentation of the media landscape has also given rise to specialist agencies (creative, media, digital, experiential) which adds further complexity to the remuneration process.”

“A remuneration survey has been done by the U.S. Association of National Advertisers for about 15 years, and we have modelled our questionnaire on theirs so that results can be compared. We will also feed our results into an international study being done by the World Federation of Advertisers. This will give us global comparisons.”

Participating advertisers will get a free copy of the aggregated results, so they can benchmark their practices both locally and internationally. Companies will provide their data anonymously through a secure web portal so that individual company data is invisible.

The survey will be conducted on behalf of AANA by Newspoll, one of Australia’s leading market research companies, with technical support from agency remuneration expert Darren Woolley of Trinity P3.

For further information:
Scott McClellan, CEO, Australian Association of National Advertisers, P: 02 9221 8088