An Honest Ad Agency Project Proposal
Now may be a good time to let you know that we have no idea what “strategy” means.
Dear Conglomocorp,
Thank you for inviting our firm to submit a proposal for your company’s forthcoming digital campaign launch. We’re excited to be in consideration for this opportunity, which is a big deal to your company and literally no one else in the world. Our team here at ID-8 Design Agency is thrilled to be a contender for this project as our agency isn’t very well known and our 24-year-old head of marketing is dying to get some action at Cannes Lyon this year. We understand you’re interested in what we can bring to the table because we’re a team of intelligent, creative individuals who all gave up on our artistic aspirations so we could do things like write ads that help pharmaceutical companies sell prescription drugs to aging housewives.
Before we go any further, we’d like to let you know in advance that, should you choose to go with our agency, the final project will be nothing like what we promised you. This is because we forgot to talk to our project management team about the feasibility of executing this complicated pitch within the timeframe you require. Had we done that, they would have told us that what you’re asking for is literally impossible to complete by this ridiculous deadline. However, we fully expect them to work late and on the weekends for two months until you, the client, decide internally to push the project launch date back until next quarter to coincide with seasonal trends. Our team is already looking forward to the email telling us your CEO made that decision two weeks ago but somehow you neglected to let us know.
As requested, we’ve broken down the project as follows:*
- Research: 60 hours
- Strategic planning: 100 hours
- Formatting Google Docs into Microsoft Word because your CEO doesn’t understand the cloud: 30 hours
- Trying to figure out which version of the Word document is the most recent one: 12 hours
- Formatting Word documents back into Google Docs because our junior designer doesn’t understand Microsoft: 26 hours
- Creating unnecessary spreadsheets for no reason: 50 hours
- Designing: 100 hours
- Meetings (extremely productive): 100 hours
- Meetings (somewhat productive): 200 hours
- Meetings (completely useless): 600 hours
- Time spent preparing for meetings we’ll ultimately cancel because it’s National Margarita Day and Trish ordered tacos: 45 hours
* Estimate does not include the dozens of hours of travel time we expect to incur for in-person meetings that definitely could have been handled over video chat.
Now may be a good time to let you know that we have no idea what “strategy” means. We fully anticipate spending weeks in meetings trying to nail down a strategic plan before running with the one our intern originally suggested at the kickoff meeting. However, our creative director Tony will gladly take credit for it, unless you don’t like it, in which case said intern will be immediately fired.
We like to think of ourselves as a design agency, but I hope it’s clear to you by now that we’ll do literally anything you ask — website development, public relations, SEO, influencer marketing, data science, social media and even having our administrative assistant run personal tasks errands for your spoiled children — as long as you’re willing to pay us lots of money. This applies to things we have zero experience doing, although we hope you understand we’ll tell you we have tons of experience if you ask.
And with that, our final quote for this project is $200,000, though we will definitely submit your project two weeks past deadline and request twice that amount as payment. We know that you, Conglomocorp, could afford to pay us triple that number. However, we are desperate for your business, plus our head of sales believes your company’s logo will make a huge difference for our firm when we inevitably place it on our website without your permission.
Thanks again for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
Deb Funtz, Chief Relationship Synergist
ID-8 Design Agency, Inc.
