Eliminate Unpredictable Creative Costs with Fixed-Price Subscriptions

As marketers begin to turn their attention toward 2023; budget considerations will be top of mind, with economic uncertainty tightening purse strings and putting expenditure under the microscope. 

In a survey conducted by ebiquity, 74% of respondents (global brand leaders) stated that their 2023 budget decisions are being influenced by the recession. This “influence” is creating tighter budgets where more attention is being paid to each dollar spent. 

From a creative point of view, this can be challenging as creative spend has always been notoriously difficult to predict. This has been caused by the fact that digital media is highly volatile, with unexpected changes constantly occurring, causing marketers to adapt their creative in response—increasing costs. Under traditional pricing structures, such as billable hours and unit-based costs, this leads to additional spend that wasn’t originally budgeted for. Unpredictable incoming costs is obviously something to be avoided—especially when budgets are under higher levels of scrutiny. 

There is, however, a way to do away with uncertain creative costs: fixed-cost creative subscriptions. 

What are creative subscriptions?

As we all know, the past few years has seen a boom in subscription services, with everything from movies to coffee now implementing this model of consumption. Ad creative has now also joined the party, but not just for the sake of it; creative subscriptions have arisen due to a direct need from today’s marketers.

The old way of paying for creative—billable hours and unit-based costs—are remnants of a print and television past where creative requirements pale in comparison to what is needed today. As a marketer, you now need hundreds, if not thousands, of assets each quarter, spread across multiple platforms and targeting different audience segments. You also need to refresh creative regularly, and make changes on the fly in order to optimize performance. These demands are difficult to satisfy under traditional pricing structures.

A creative subscription—such as Shuttlerock’s CaaS (Creative as a Service) solution—on the other hand, lays a foundation that enables you to achieve these aims.

The key is cost-certainty

Under a creative subscription, you pay a fixed monthly cost, from which you’re able to produce all of your creative needs. This fixed price, therefore, provides you with cost-certainty—a consistent, transparent view of incoming creative costs.

This is big, because after you remove the restrictions of incremental costs, you free up a range of powerful opportunities:

1. Platform optimization:
   Give your campaign the best chance of performing to its potential by producing creative variations, each being optimized for the different platforms/placements within your promotional mix.  
   
   
2. Creative agility:
   Immediately respond to trends and opportunities by producing new or updated creative assets without needing to seek approval for additional costs. 
   
   
3. Avoid ad fatigue:
   When you’re operating on a creative subscription, it encourages you to take an always-on approach to creative production. Doing so means that you can regularly refresh the creative assets that you’re running in order to avoid ad fatigue.

These are just some of the performance-related benefits that cost-certainty, derived from a creative subscription, offers. However, the benefits of cost-certainty go beyond helping your campaigns. They extend to the jobs of CMOs and CFOs in that it eliminates unpredictability, making planning and budgeting easier—with the confidence that costs aren’t going to escalate wildly.  

Economic conditions may be uncertain, but when you have certainty with your creative costs, it can be a big help for any marketing team.  

Creative subscriptions at Shuttlerock

At Shuttlerock, subscription pricing plans are an integral part of our CaaS (Creative as a Service) solution. If you would like to learn more about CaaS subscriptions, please feel free to visit our dedicated landing page, explore our pricing options or get in touch with one of our team members.