Carmen Hill

The second worst part of market research is imagining the myriad of ways that the information provided might lead the recipient down the wrong path. The absolute worst part? Being that recipient. But in fairness, if it's "just the numbers" that you're interested in, you brought it on yourself. Getting the complete picture requires a qualitative and quantitative approach. #marketresearch #research #marketing

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Warren Buffett said, "Price is what you pay; value is what you get." Jen Davidson just wrote one of the better articles about agency pricing I've read this year. Her core argument: agencies systematically destroyed their own value proposition by bundling senior strategic expertise as "free" in retainers. The creative director solving brand challenges, the senior strategist repositioning products, and the leadership navigating crises all positioned as complementary resources rather than premium offerings. The result? When clients evaluate in-housing decisions, they're comparing what they think they're buying (junior execution costs) against internal alternatives. They miss the senior strategic guidance they've actually been receiving because agencies taught them it had no distinct value. It seems cost-effective until they discover they can't replicate the invisible intelligence that made everything work. Content production faces exactly this trap right now. As AI enables systematic generation at scale, there's enormous pressure to compete on volume and speed. To bundle strategic production thinking as overhead. To treat technical orchestration as a commodity service. But AI is about to expose that pricing dysfunction brutally. When automation handles execution, what remains must be genuinely valuable strategic intelligence and craft. Solution design that architects optimal content ecosystems. Bespoke pipeline development combining conventional capture precision with AI-augmented generation. Technical expertise, knowing when photorealistic product fidelity requires digital twins versus when backgrounds can be generated infinitely. Orchestration capabilities linking upstream origination to downstream omnichannel personalisation at scale. Without this strategic layer properly valued, you get exactly what I wrote about in Mediocrity is Free: competent 7/10 content that fails to drive growth. A sea of sameness where brands flood markets with forgettable content because the human intelligence that creates relevance got bundled away as free overhead. This is why our content studio model separates consulting, origination, and activation as distinct value propositions. Not because we want complex pricing. Because the strategic architecture, technical depth, and systematic orchestration that enables content at scale cannot be bundled away as "free." Jen's right. The industry desperately needs reframing. Senior expertise has never been more valuable. AI proves it by eliminating everything else. Time we priced accordingly. https://lnkd.in/gj-GriAu

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