Mike Nelson, MBA

I used to think higher pricing meant harder work. But with agencies, that’s rarely true. The ones charging premium rates? They’re not working more — They’ve just positioned better. Here’s what they do differently: → Niche down → Sell outcomes, not hours → Focus on perception, proof, and premium clients Here’s the insight: Agencies that niche + position around outcomes Charge 2–5x more than generalists — Often with fewer clients and leaner teams. It’s not about doing more. It’s about being seen as worth more. PS: I post business insights daily. You might consider following to not miss in the future.

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Worried about declining website traffic? Take a cue from Joe Martin at Hearst. In a recent recap from #FIPPCongress2025, Joe shared how Hearst is leveraging first-party data—not just to deliver value, but to optimize their sites so the user experience truly matches the content. It’s about taking a holistic view across all platforms to ensure you’re giving customers the best possible experience: delivering the right content seamlessly, at the right time, without friction: "Engagement also depends on experience. “We can produce some of the best content available,” Joe said, “but if we have a bad experience, people are not going to stick around.” Hearst’s teams have therefore prioritised technical excellence – page-load speed, metadata, and canonical structures that avoid competing URLs. “We’ve actually created SEO checklists and a playbook for best practices that we’re rolling out to our international offices and our network of licensees,” he said. “Despite the talk of declines, we’re actually up year-on-year in traffic across our international brands.”"

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What’s the one SEO hill you’d die on? 🤔 ‣ Content? ‣ Best-in-class technical SEO? ‣ Chunking?! ❌ Nope. 🥸 A human in the loop. Duane Forrester - who’s led teams at major tech companies like Microsoft and Yext - still believes keeping humans in the loop is business critical. Only this morning, a major auditor agreed to refund the Albanese government after errors and hallucinations were found in a $440,000 AI-generated report. By all means, integrate AI into your workflows - you absolutely should - but not at the expense of quality or trust. Human review is essential. Complacency kills output, credibility and reputation. Do you agree with Duane? In 2025, what SEO hill will you die on? #SEO #AI #ContentStrategy #Search #AIAgents #DigitalMarketing #GEO #TechnicalSEO #HumanInTheLoop #Leadership #Marketing

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💩 I'm calling BS on Google's latest Q2 Search Revenue announcement. Google just announced impressive Q2 revenue growth for search (10% YOY). They also mentioned in their report that AI-powered search (AI overviews, AI mode) now has 2b monthly users. So the natural conclusion would be - "Google is delivering more search products and thus more traffic/clicks - which is resulting in more revenue" But not so fast. Various industry benchmarks and studies are showing that click volume from search is actually steady, or showing only modest growth at around 2%. So what explains the 10% growth in Search? Easy - auction manipulation. The same studies that show the 2% growth in clicks also show a 7-9% growth in CPC. As Google pushes more advertisers to automated machine-based bidding, we are now in a situation where a bunch of AI-based bidding algorithms are bidding against each other, driving up CPCs. This, of course, is not sustainable. Which is why Google is moving fast to push its advertisers away from search-only and into mid to upper funnel campaigns like P-Max and Demand Gen. So don't believe the hype. Google isn't getting more customers, or even generating more clicks for its existing customers. It's just charging the same set of customers more.

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There are countless articles about agency pricing models - hourly vs. value-based, retainers vs. project fees, performance comp, hybrids. It’s become a near-obsession in our industry. But, trust me: if your pricing “doesn’t work,” it’s almost never the model. It’s the value. Hard stop. You can charge hourly and win. You can charge value-based and win. You can package outcomes and win. We prefer value pricing at Brandish, b/c we try to anchor our work to outcomes, but the model itself isn’t the differentiator. The delivery is. Clients only dissect pricing when they’re unsure about the value they’re receiving. Of course they do, that's the same way we all are in our own lives. When something feels marginal, we scrutinize the cost. We compare. We negotiate. We question. But when something is genuinely valuable, when it clearly drives results or meaning, we rarely analyze the price in the same way. We contextualize it. We move forward. We're good. Instead of obsessing over your pricing structure, ask the harder question: are we actually creating meaningful value for the client? Not activity. Not output. Not a bunch of PDF's. Real value. So many agencies lead with their pricing philosophy or spend disproportionate energy refining packaging and rate cards. Meanwhile, if we’re being candid, a meaningful percentage of their clients probably wouldn’t re-sign if given a clean slate. Here’s the thought exercise I like to come back to: if every single client you have today was given the choice - knowing everything they know now - would they without hesitation, choose to work with you again? If the answer isn’t a confident yes, the issue likely isn’t your pricing model. It’s your value creation. #itsaboutpeople (📸: testing out some diff views in the new space)

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If your brand’s Amazon channel is clean, but your Walmart listings are wild, you’re not in control. You’re seeing the symptom, not the source. You’re one seller away from a price war that spills across every channel. Most brands treat marketplaces like separate battles, Amazon gets all the attention, Walmart gets handled “later.” But that’s not control. That’s containment. The truth is, what happens on one platform doesn’t stay there. Amazon sellers pop up on Walmart. Feed syncs spread bad data. Algorithms follow the lowest price, not the right one. If you’re a 1P vendor, that loop can crush your margins fast. In CPG, per-ounce price matching can create weeks of downstream chaos. These are systemic issues. And they only get solved with systemic visibility. Control means consistency. The same truth everywhere your brand shows up. Not just compliance on Amazon, but connected enforcement across every channel. Because when you’re not clean everywhere, you’re just one slip-up away from a mess that hits right before, or right after a promo, when it hurts most. That creates a painful hangover effect... Focusing on one marketplace isn’t control; it’s tunnel vision. Consumers are searching everywhere now: Google, LLMs, and every platform in between. Your brand needs to show up consistently wherever the search starts. Your brand has to show up consistently wherever the search starts. Because channel control isn’t about managing a single marketplace...it’s about mastering the entire ecosystem of where your brand lives. #ThornCrest #BrandProtection #ChannelControl

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How do you measure the cost of lightning in a bottle? Traditional cost accounting works beautifully for most things that are manufactured based on a formula or a blueprint. But Ideas are different. You can track material costs, labor hours, machine time, and overhead with surgical precision. But creative ideas in ad agencies? That's where costing (and therefore pricing) for agency services stops working and a whole industry teeters on the edge of bankruptcy. Consider this scenario: A junior creative has a breakthrough idea on the morning drive to work that becomes a $50M campaign. Meanwhile, a senior team spends 200 billable hours on a concept that gets killed in the first client meeting. Which was more "expensive" to produce? Our accounting systems obsess over tracking every billable hour, but they completely miss: -The "eureka moments" that are the lifeblood of the creative process -The value of creative cross-pollination between unrelated projects -The accumulated experience that makes seemingly effortless work possible -The psychological safety required for risk-taking and innovation We've become masterful at measuring inputs—salary costs, software licenses, office rent—but terrible at connecting these to creative outputs. A campaign that took 50 hours might outperform one that took 500 hours. Yet our cost models treat them as inversely valuable. This creates perverse incentives. We optimize for billable hours instead of breakthrough thinking. We penalize efficiency and reward wheel-spinning. We measure creative success by how much we spent rather than what we achieved. Maybe we're asking the wrong question entirely. Instead of "What did this idea cost?" perhaps we should ask "What would not having this idea have cost our client?" The best creative work often prevents problems we'll never measure: the brand crisis that doesn't happen, the market opportunity that doesn't get missed, the emotional connection that never gets severed. Traditional cost accounting assumes we're in the business of producing predictable outputs from measurable inputs. But we're really in the business of producing valuable surprises from intangible assets. That's not a bug in our financial models—it's the fundamental nature of creative work. The sooner we acknowledge this reality, the better we can arrive at a costing structure that measures that right things and save the industry from extinction. What's your experience with measuring creative ROI? #advertising #Agency #Pricing #AOR #Tips

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