Our marketing team is terrified of requesting design work because of how unpredictable the cost gets. Has anyone solved this with a fixed price creative model?
This is a problem I did not expect to have and it took me a while to even recognize it was happening.
Our marketing team had started self-censoring their creative requests. Rather than asking for the number of assets they actually needed to run campaigns properly, they were consolidating requests, reusing old graphics longer than they should, and making do with good-enough creative because they knew every additional request meant another line item on an invoice that was already hard to predict.
The irony is that this cost-consciousness in creative requests was probably costing us more in campaign performance than the design invoices themselves. Running fatigued ad creatives longer than you should because you do not want to trigger a new design cost is a false economy when you calculate the CPM impact.
What changed our approach was moving to a set monthly rate for all our design work. When the cost is fixed regardless of volume, the team requests what they actually need rather than what they can justify. Creative output went up. Campaign performance improved. And our total creative spend actually went down compared to what we were paying before on a per-asset basis.
The psychological shift of moving from variable to fixed cost design was as impactful as the financial one. Has anyone else experienced this effect where cost predictability changed the behavior of your marketing team around creative requests?