Monthly retainer or one-off project: what a B2B firm should actually buy

A one-off project buys an object: a video, a set of photographs, delivered and done. A monthly retainer buys repetition: produce, distribute, look at what worked, correct. So the question is not which one costs less. It is what your problem actually is. If you are missing an asset, buy a project. If the problem is that nobody sees you between two tenders, a project on its own will not fix it. And there are cases where one well-made video is enough, and the right decision is to stop there.

This page compares the two for the owner or general manager of a Quebec industrial or technical firm. It compares no prices except ours, which is published. How long a minimum engagement should be is a separate question, covered in minimum marketing agency engagement.

What each one actually buys

A project has a start, an end and a list of deliverables. You know what you are paying and what you are getting. That is its strength. Its limit is that it stops at the exact moment the object starts doing its job. The video is delivered, placed on the website, shared once on LinkedIn, and the supplier is already on another file.

A monthly retainer should not be judged on the month's deliverables. It should be judged on correction. What you are paying for is someone who looks at who saw what, pulls the message that attracts the wrong requests, and shoots the next piece knowing what the previous one taught. Without that loop, a retainer is just a project cut into invoices.

So the question to put to a supplier offering a retainer is simple: what changes in month four because of what we saw in month three. If the only answer is a posting calendar, they are selling volume, not continuity.

Why a long sales cycle leans toward continuity

In an industrial purchase, the decision is not made the day your video comes out. It is made months later, by a committee that includes an engineer, a buyer, a plant manager and sometimes someone from finance. Each of them runs into you at a different moment, or not at all.

Take, as an illustration, a conveyor manufacturer in the Beauce region selling to food processing plants. Its customers plan their capital spending from one year to the next. An excellent video published in the spring, seen once, is forgotten by the time the budget opens in the fall. What the buyer remembers is the supplier they kept seeing, with different proof each time: an installation delivered, a customer speaking, the president explaining a design choice.

That is what a one-off project cannot do alone. It produces the proof. It does not keep that proof in front of the right people for as long as the decision takes.

The honest case for one project, and stopping there

There are situations where a project, delivered and finished, is exactly the right thing to buy. They are not fringe cases, and a supplier who never recognises them is selling you something other than what you need.

• The video has one job and one user. A plant tour your reps send after a first call. A loop for the screen at your trade show booth. A video for a job posting. Nobody needs to distribute it: the people who need it use it directly.
• Your buyers are few and known by name. When your market fits on a list your sales team reaches personally, the rep is the distribution. Give them solid proof and let them work.
• You want to judge a supplier before committing. A well-defined project shows how they shoot, how they listen and how they deliver. It is a better test than a pitch, and it leaves you an asset even if you go no further.

In those three cases, buy the project, demand the files and a licence with no expiry date, and stop there. The question of the raw footage gets settled before the shoot, as explained in who owns the raw video footage. Come back to the retainer question when your sales team tells you it is short of material, not before.

When the comparison does not arise

If you already have someone in-house who posts, runs the campaigns and follows the results, the continuity already exists at your company. What you are missing is probably production, and a well-aimed project fills that gap. How to split the work between an in-house person and an outside team is covered in agency or an in-house hire.

On the other hand, if your sales hardly depend on marketing, for example because two prime contractors buy most of your output on multi-year contracts, neither option is urgent. A good filmed plant tour and an up-to-date website will probably serve you for a long time.

Our own arrangement, and what it assumes

The Signal Program is an ongoing mandate, and I publish its terms rather than defend them with averages. The published price is $3,500 / month, ad spend separate, with a 3-month minimum engagement. After those three months, the client can stop at any time. A tailored package can also be built around your needs, your budget and your goals.

What it contains explains why it is a retainer and not a project: a full-day 12K cinema shoot every 3 months, three videos of about one minute and six clips of 15 to 30 seconds, weekly optimisation and a monthly report, with distribution to the CEOs, VPs and directors of your market. We are two people, and the person who shoots is the person who runs the ad accounts. That is what lets correction carry from one quarter to the next without anything getting lost on the way.

If what you describe to me sounds like one of the cases where a project is enough, I would rather tell you so. An ongoing mandate sold to a company that needed a single video ends badly for both sides.