What should a marketing retainer actually include?

Retainer disputes are almost never about price. They are about a scope that was described in the language of activity — ongoing management, continuous optimisation, strategic oversight — which sounds like a lot of work and specifies none. When results are good nobody examines it. When they are not, both parties discover they held different beliefs about what was being bought, and neither is being dishonest.

The fix is quantities. Not the number of hours, which invites theatre, but the number of things: how many pieces of content, how many campaigns, how many reports, how many calls, how many reviews of what. A retainer specifying that four things arrive each month is assessable at the end of each month by anyone. A retainer specifying management is assessable by nobody, which is why it drifts.

The second term is who does the work, and it is where the gap between the sale and the delivery usually opens. Work sold by a senior person and delivered by a junior one is normal, defensible and priced accordingly — as long as it was disclosed. A retainer should say who is on the account and what proportion of it is theirs. The question to ask before signing is simply who will be doing this and who will be on our calls, and a supplier who answers vaguely is answering.

The third is ownership, and it is the term with the longest consequences. Who owns the advertising account, the analytics property, the domain, the content produced, the tracking configuration, the audience lists. The default in many arrangements is that the agency owns them, which means leaving means starting again, and that possibility silently disciplines every subsequent conversation about performance. Everything should be created in accounts the client owns and the agency is granted access to, and this is far easier to establish at the start than to unwind later.

The fourth is exit. Notice period, what is handed over, in what format, and by when. An arrangement with no exit terms is not a partnership, it is a dependency, and its absence is most keenly felt at exactly the moment relations have deteriorated. Agreeing it while everyone is optimistic costs nothing and is the clearest signal available about how a supplier expects the relationship to end.

What should not be in a retainer is a guarantee of outcomes the supplier does not control. Guaranteed rankings, guaranteed leads and guaranteed positions are either meaningless — achieved on queries nobody searches — or they indicate someone willing to promise what cannot be promised. What can legitimately be committed is work delivered, response times, reporting cadence and a shared measure of enquiries, which is a better set of promises because they can all be kept.