No listicles, no thought-leadership fog. This is the stuff you learn from seven years selling media inside India's biggest media houses, written down so you can use it whether or not you ever hire us.
The published price is an anchor, not a price. Where the padding really sits in an Indian media proposal, the seven questions that move a number, and the two-column test that shrinks most decks by a third.
Open your site on your phone and count to ten. The five questions every visitor arrives with, the four ways pages lose them, and an afternoon's worth of fixes that don't need a redesign.
Property marketing isn't advertising, it's evidence. The trust ladder buyers actually climb, the order a brochure should be built in, and three specifics that outperform any rendering.
Tiers are a pricing device, not a description of value. What to negotiate instead of logo size, when to walk, and how the deal changes in the last three weeks.
Most branding problems are sentence problems. The four parts of a line that survives being repeated by somebody else, and four tests, one of them brutal.
New businesses rarely fail from spending too little. They fail from spending in the wrong sequence. A month-by-month order, the four things people buy too early, and a rough allocation.
Written by an agency, about agencies, with our own answers included. How pricing, retainers and commission actually work, and the one question that separates a partner from a vendor.
Marketing in India runs on asymmetry. The person quoting you a rate knows what it transacts at and you don't. The person selling a sponsorship tier built the tier. The agency proposing a retainer knows which half of it is real work.
None of that is illegal or even unusual. It's just what happens when one side has spent years inside the machine and the other side is buying it for the second time in their life.
We spent those years inside the machine: at The Times of India, at ET Edge, at Pepper Content. Writing this down costs us some negotiating advantage and wins us something better: clients who ask sharper questions and buy less rubbish.
If a piece here saves you money and you never hire us, that's a fine outcome. More about where this comes from →
A proposal to sanity-check, a site that isn't converting, a launch you're sequencing. Ask. It's free until it isn't.
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