Let’s break down six things to consider before you switch from a retainer-based marketing agency to project-based teams.
What’s it like to market your brand in today’s full-tilt, lightning-fast consumer culture?
First off, there are more ways than ever to share your message. Great marketing campaigns use hundreds of assets and many of them get distributed in real-time. (Instagram is instant! Snapchats arrive in a snap!)
Demographics are quickly shifting, too. An ever-widening range of cultural identities (rooted in race, age, religion, gender, sexuality, etc.) color consumers’ perceptions of your product. And you might even be navigating these waters with a shrinking budget.
For all these reasons and more, the old marketing model—hiring a traditional agency on a retainer—is starting to feel outdated. “A lot of what I’m hearing from brands is that they’re getting frustrated with agency turnaround times, additional fees, and creative output that’s just getting stale,” says Laurie Soukup, a Senior Client Director at We Are Rosie who partners with marketing and creative departments at Fortune 500 brands.
If you’re experiencing that dissatisfaction, you might be open to alternatives. You might think, “What my brand really needs is a quick and nimble, custom-built, project-based marketing team that understands its audience.” But if you’ve relied on the same, retainer-based agency for a decade or more, switching to this other option can feel risky. Is it really prudent to hand over your next important project to a small team of skilled freelancers?
In the spirit of due diligence, here are some basic features you can expect from the project-based approach. Keep these considerations in mind before switching to this new way of working.
1. As with an agency, you’ll want a single point of contact.
You may love the idea of a custom-crafted marketing team for each project. But if the idea of organizing all those contractors makes you want to tear your hair out, don’t fret. There’s another option, which is partnering with We Are Rosie’s Run by Rosie service. They’ll find and vet the talent, build your team, and relieve you of the administrative details—so you’ll still only have one phone call to make.
“A brand delivers a marketing brief to us in the same way that they would deliver it to an agency,” says Cathleen Ayala, We Are Rosie’s VP of Operations. “They tell us what the expected outcome is, what they know about their customers, what the deliverables might mean, and what their timeline is. We take it, ask any clarifying questions, and get to work.”
Having a single point-person is a feature that Run by Rosie shares with traditional agencies. But with a traditional agency, that benefit often comes with strings attached. Once the agency wins your business, you might be locked into a five-year contract. Not so with Run by Rosie. “Once the project is done, you’re done,” Laurie says. “The client can call us back and say they have another project, but they don’t have to. You’re not locked into anything beyond that.” Of course, when you do call again, you can ask for the same point of contact you worked with before.
2. You can make more specific and detailed asks.
Run by Rosie builds teams from a pool of nearly 35,000 seasoned marketing experts. Obviously, this breadth of experience gives brands access to a range of talent well beyond what a traditional agency can provide. You can ask for a team in which every member is from a particular identity group, one whose marketers have a track record for humor, or one where they all have a deep knowledge of a certain niche industry.
What exactly can you ask for in a brief? Think big. Chances are, there are freelancers out there who can accomplish your goal—especially when you embrace remote teams and aren’t limited by geography. Among the Rosie ranks are experts in digital marketing, promotion, branding, paid media, and scores of niche specializations. In other words, Laurie says, “We can do anything that falls within the marketing umbrella.”
An out-of-the-box request isn’t a big deal when you’re drawing from a thousands-strong army of creatives. For one recent project, a social media platform needed a marketing team that could convert its online experience into a live event.
We Are Rosie assembled a team that got the job done quickly. First, they identified the overall feel and themes of the brand and platform. Next, they incorporated those concepts into invitations, signage, decorations, activities, and party merchandise that could be produced anywhere. Finally, they combined these elements to create a customized “toolkit” that the brand could use at its holiday events across the country.
“We took the experience of [this social media platform] and elevated the whole program,” Laurie says.
3. You can get short-term marketing support to fill a gap—fast.
Big agencies specialize in large, multi-tiered campaigns. But if you’re looking for a few specialists to jump in and assist on a project for a short period, the project-based model might be better suited to your needs.
Recently, a manufacturing and hospitality company was in the midst of hiring a full-time creative team to promote its resort destinations. But as they went through this process, they needed some specialists with hospitality experience to help keep the wheels turning.
“They were looking for creatives who already understood the category and knew how to reach those consumers,” says Marie Lamonica, We Are Rosie’s Managing Director of Creative. “And we were able to pull together a group of Rosies who had that experience. It was all very seamless, and they were quickly and easily integrated into the overall team.”
If you need some quick help from your retainer agency, there are often processes and requirements that draw timelines out. “Sometimes the process just to get to round one work is three to four weeks from the time of briefing,” says Jessica Clifton, an executive marketing strategist working with We Are Rosie.
On the other hand, project-based teams tend to be more flexible with turn-around times. “If you tell a project-based team, ‘I need this in two weeks,’ they can do whatever it takes to get that done,” Jessica says. “Sometimes that requires them working extra hours or over weekends, but they’re committed to doing that because they know very clearly that that’s the ask. If they didn’t want to do that, they wouldn’t have taken the opportunity.”
4. You might choose to spend more time on your brief.
As you become accustomed to working with the project-based approach, you’ll handle increasingly fewer logistics. “Run by Rosie moves in right away to support the teams so the client doesn’t have to,” Cathleen says. “That means making sure that they have everything that they need, that the communication and collaboration with the client is smooth, that the timelines are right, and that we’re delivering work that’s solid.”
This frees up your time, and Cathleen recommends that clients use it to focus on the project scope and the brief itself. “If a client delivers a brief that’s extremely detailed, that reduces the startup time to project kickoff,” Cathleen explains.
Run by Rosie recently received a detailed brief from a client that’s an insurance provider. “Insurance can be boring, right?” Laurie says. “But they wanted it to be funny and quirky.”
Rather than wasting time finding just the right people for the job, this client focused on the deliverables. They knew they wanted to be on certain channels like Reddit and Meta. They knew how many assets they wanted in total. They knew the timeline in which they needed it to be done. “And then they just handed it over to us and said, ‘Please help us elevate our brand,’” Laurie says.
Run by Rosie built a small but agile creative team with a strong background in this client’s industry, and the team included a copywriter with a “funny and quirky” track record on social media. “They were highly impressed with the budget that we brought back to them, and they loved the team that we put together,” Laurie says. “It met all the needs that they were looking for.”
5. You’ll know where your money is going.
With agencies, you pay a general retainer fee for marketing services at a set rate for the length of a years-long contract. You generally aren’t in control of who works on your project and how their time is allocated.
“You might be set up with this big retainer that’s full of bloat,” Jessica says. “And [there are] people who sit on calls and in meetings who add zero value but are billing their time against your budget.” You can never be sure if your fees are helping to pay for other projects, though you can be sure that at least some of it is going towards the company’s overhead costs.
“With Run by Rosie, there’s no retainer fee, so you only pay for what we scope out,” Laurie says. “And we only cast who is needed—no people for the sake of adding people.”
How exactly does the project-based model lead to lower costs for brands? After all, logic says that if you want something really fast and really cheap, it’s not going to be that good. Or, if you want something really fast and really good, it will be really expensive.
“But when you move to a project-based team, you really can have it all, because the quality and the precision of talent casting is so unique,” Jessica says. “It’s focused on bringing the right people with the right experience and the right pedigree. They can onboard immediately, interpret a brief very quickly, bring their previous experience into the equation, and deliver that round one thinking.” Time saved equals money saved.
6. You’ll have an advocate in dealing with corporate inertia.
If you’re at a mid-sized or large company, you may be used to slow processes and red tape. Great ideas often have to funnel their way through several levels of staff to come to fruition. After weeks of this process, they might be in danger of getting snuffed out or emerging in a less innovative version. “Too many cooks in the kitchen” can also open the door for missteps like cultural misappropriation.
It would sure be helpful to have a seasoned ally to help get your ideas through!
With the project-based approach, you’ll have a small group of specialized experts in your corner—people who know the target audience and even might literally represent them.
“You might not be able to get rid of the multiple layers of approval that exist within your company,” Cathleen says. “But what you get with [Run by Rosie] is a partnership that can go into those meetings with you and support you in how you deliver that to your boss, your boss’s boss, etc.” The best part about project-based teams is arguably right in the description: It’s just about the project. Even for the risk-averse, enlisting a team of skilled freelancers for one project is a low-stakes decision. After you try it out, you can decide whether you want to go back to the traditional agency model. Or not.
