Introduction
Thank you. Hi, everyone, and welcome to Marketplace Masters, the podcast where we go beyond the surface to uncover the strategies that help Amazon agencies and operators truly move the needle.
Paul Sonneveld
I'm your host, Paul Sonneveld, coming to you today live from the Amazon Unboxed event here in Nashville. Today, we're tackling one of the most critical and often debated topics for agency leaders, right? How to price your services. This is a live session. So if you're joining us in real time on YouTube, LinkedIn or Facebook, we'd love to hear from you. Bring your questions, your experiences and even your frustrations. That's what makes these conversations really valuable. Just pop them in the comments section, and we'll tackle them.
Now, to help us unpack the complexity of agency pricing, whether it's retainers, revenue share, or product-type services, I'm once again joined by Scott Ohsman, the VP of Digital Commerce at Quickfire, a full-service digital agency supporting consumer brands across marketplaces, SEM, paid social, influencer marketing, and marketing and creative strategy. Now, many of you will know Scott. He's been in the game for over thirty years, launching more than two hundred brands on Amazon. He brings a brand first mindset shaped by deep retail and e-commerce experience, and he also runs his own sales and marketing agency out of the Pacific Northwest. He hosts multiple podcasts. And fun fact, he is a seasoned sportscaster and a live event emcee, including the Seattle Marathon. Scott, you've been on our show before, but it's an absolute pleasure to have you back today.
Scott Ohsman
Always good to be here. Thanks for having me. And hey, it's high school football playoffs. Got a big game Friday night.
Paul Sonneveld
Maybe we should answer these questions in your sort of calling voice, you know.
Scott Ohsman
Yes, yes, yes.
Paul Sonneveld
But I imagine we will do the podcast in about two minutes. Some people may prefer that, but let's go for the long version for now. So, today we're talking about pricing, super relevant topic, right? Because even here at Unboxed today, you know, Amazon making lots of announcements that maybe impact some of this stuff, right? Generative AI and the like. But let's just start from the top. Why is pricing such a difficult topic for agencies, and why does it matter so much?
Scott Ohsman
It's always been so difficult, and it continues to be difficult because they're trying to get the size of clients and what clients are going to be paying for what services. Because really, the pricing comes down to. I need to hire external expertise, but the CFOs and C-suites and everybody who looks at the financial says, God, it has to stay below a level where you're like, why can't we just internally hire this self? So we're paying X amount of dollars a month. It's costing us a year. Why don't we just do it ourselves? And that is the constant tension, right?
That's the healthy tension between agency and client. And the pricing is critical. And it's amazing how different so many different agencies in the Amazon space, whether you're full digital or it's amazing. The creativity of the pricing and how it adjusts and how it's evolved over the years is amazing. And it fluctuates as far as pricing over the years and over the time, and the tech and evolved of what services are critical or not. So it's a massive deal because it's a highly intensive labor, intensive, really smart people and really great tech like MerchantString. But it's tough to keep your margins good when you're doing a full service. And that's why pricing is so critical.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, absolutely. And such an important point. I remember thinking about this really long and hard, around how do we make sure that pricing still makes us the number one financial choice versus the insourcing question. Super important. But let's talk about the different models that are out there. I mean, you've seen all these different models of the years. I mean, what are the main pricing models that you see agencies use today?
Scott Ohsman
I mean, most of it, it's all over the board and people, I keep running into new ones actually, which shout out everybody for coming up with more creative ways to do this is the most traditional one is a monthly flat fee, a retainer, a fee that is usually relatively low depending on the size of the business and what have you. And then there's a revenue share. So there's a total operating sales or in the vendor space. A lot of times it's off COGS or invoiced.
So there's a percentage share of a revenue share plus that. Then there's the Ad part of it, which is really evolved and changed. I mean, we didn't have this years and years ago, but the percentage of Ad spend and that has become a critical part for agencies. This is also an agency where they're going to make a lot of margin and maybe, you know, almost maintain margin and blended margin and make up for some losses in the services part of it. So that's one. So fee plus rev share plus add a percentage of spend. I have issues there on all of that.
The other one is just more heavily rev share. So it's, Hey, I got skin in the game. I'm going to hire these external people because what do I got to lose, right? It's less expensive than internal. I couldn't do all the stuff they do. And you know what? They're willing to go on the line. So we have skin in the game and they're going to put it. So it's a very, very low or no monthly retainer. It's a hundred percent revenue. The other side is a small, again, if it's Ad-based, depending on that, it's, again, small, small revenue and a big Ad base.
The other big thing is different tiers and different variations and creative ways to come up with revenue shares is when you're starting date, the agency takes over to the, okay, you're only get five percent on the increase that the agency has impact on. This is cut up a billion different ways. And the same thing with percentage of spent on Ads is they spent this. We're only going to charge them this. Then there's the tiered. Okay. You can, if you spend a hundred thousand dollars to two hundred thousand, we get you this rate, but then it goes to a different one. So there's, there's all kinds of stuff that is happening with that. Those are the main, most popular ones.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, I was going to say, I've started seeing some agencies that have really gone, I guess, fee-for-service in the sense that either they charge for their time, a bit like the traditional accounting firm, or just for services, really just like, here's a menu of stuff. Okay, you want a PDP done, that's, I don't know, 1200 bucks, you want this done that’s, do you see still any of that or you feel like that's sort of, you know, gone out of vogue a bit?
Scott Ohsman
No, no, that's a great point. I was just trying, the basic models is kind of the pillars is what I just talked about. What has happened over the years is, oh, I need creative. Okay, these are Ad Hoc services. If you need an infographic X amount of dollars, you need creative services on building content. It's X amount. I need to optimise umpteen different ASINs. There's a price for that. So Ad Hoc services, because what happens on agencies, right? They're doing all this stuff and it's out of scope, and they're not getting paid for it.
So everybody's got to do, Oh, I want forecasting. I want this. I want this. So they can reduce the monthly and they can, they can basically charge you these Ad Hoc services, right? That's been a huge, huge part of what's happened. Now, I just got to mention at Quickfire, we're small. After coming out of big agencies and everything else like that, again, I'm not saying this is the right way to do it or the wrong way to do it. We just charge a flat monthly fee. We just do the work. And because I don't want to we're going to get to this because I've already the highs and lows, the risks and rewards of all these other models I've lived through. So Quickfire, we basically simplified said, you know, here's what we do. Here's the price. See you later. We do the work. That's it. Ad hoc, we have Ad Hoc stuff, but that's it. So it's a much simpler financial.
The other biggest thing is, and the reason CFOs don't love, they don't love variables, Paul. They don't love the percentage of revenue. They don't love, they really don't like percentage of spend because it's a variable that they can't budget and they can't measure and calculate. That's the other big problem when you're doing big negotiations, CFOs get involved, and they're like, hey, I'm in for a rev share because I like that because you have skin in the game. There's some pressure and there's some financial flexibility, but man, I don't like getting a different bill every month.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it's hard, particularly with the big businesses, you know, there's a pre-agreed budget that's been signed off, you know, variances against that have to be explained, all of that, very hard. No, I get it. Just for our audience, I'd love to, can you give us some, when we talk about that first model, right, which is sort of the base plus a rev share, I mean, what are some common pricing levels that are out there, say maybe for a mid-tier agency, for a high-end agency, you know, what are the sort of going rates there? I appreciate this varies dramatically, but I think people, particularly our non-US viewers, we're really keen to understand. They might get a shock, but they're keen to understand. And what does it look like in North America right now?
Scott Ohsman
Again, disclaimer, like you've already said, right? This is the category, whatever. It's based on everyone asks, oh, well, how many ASINs and what is it vendor? Is it seller? That's a great question by one of the comments is you've got to clarify how they're actually tracking these rev shares. On vendor, it's actually it's I don't know. I could argue it's harder. I could argue it's simpler. But depends on they make their money on what they invoice, right? COGS and vendors, the closest thing we have to invoice. So you got to make sure if you're paying an agency or you're an agency, be very detailed on exactly what the percentage of the rev share is going to be. You can do ordered revenue. Great. If I'm a manufacturer, I don't love that, honestly, because that's not what I have to report internally to my finance team.
So what you're talking is can range from five thousand dollars U.S. a month and then a rev share anywhere from two percent to five percent, even eight percent, depending on the level of the customer. You can get into seventy-five hundred dollars a month. You can get into ten thousand dollars a month, then a lower percentage of rev share if it's a much, much larger where that typically happens when you're paying those kind of rates, ten to fifteen thousand dollars a month on retainer then the percentage of Ad spend actually is a higher variable. That can be from one point five percent to three percent at the high rate.
So these are all big parts of it. And there's tiers to that. So it can go from in the low, low end, two thousand dollars a month plus a rev share or even I've seen twelve hundred dollars. I mean, right now, a lot of people are outsourcing people all over the world. And so they're getting these, you know, even five hundred to twelve hundred dollars a month and they have a bigger share. maybe a ten percent even on apparel and accessories, a fifteen percent rev share. Does that give you a sense of what it is?
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it's really good. I'm just benchmarking. Ten years ago, we were charging five hundred dollars per channel actually, and then a rev share of eight or nine percent, which is quite on the high end. This was in Australia, really low market, it was really hard to get to a big number on an invoice and justified as well, probably slightly different problems. Right. So talk to me a little bit more about media spend, right? Clearly, you're not a fan. I'd love to understand what do you think, you know, why and what do you think might be a better model? And then to throw a third question in there, sorry to make it complicated. I appreciate that a lot of agencies are facing really big fees from the platforms they use to manage their Ad campaigns, you know, typically on an Ad spend basis as well. Is that included or is that something that layers on top of that for the client?
Scott Ohsman
This is the challenge. The agencies are doing the best they can, but you name the large Ad tech firm the programmatic Ad tech who's actually executing all this in the software and producing this the dashboards they're charging a percentage of Ad spend so they can't get away from it. So the Ad agency doesn't make a lot of money i i again they're they're typically having to mark that up a little bit because they got a chance the management fee to it.
But really most agencies in my experience and this again can change it's really on that monthly retainer they're trying to make sure their margins are correct for the labor and the the head count they have to put against it, the support services they have to put against it that's where they're really trying to make the margin the Ad spend is is there and it has to do they're going to mark that up a little bit but they're really they can't they don't have a choice. They have to pay the percentage of spend to use these tools and this is where I've been in a lot of, helped a lot of brands out in the last two, three years, where we basically put some tiers and some guardrails in. If we spend X amount, okay, here's the percentage.
But from an agency standpoint in a brand, I'm like, you know what? I'm not doing the percentage of spend. Let's just set this up right now. We look over the last, twelve months, eighteen months, or what have you. We look with the brand and say, this is what our spend is going to be. We have some seasonal increases here and there. That's fine. But you know what? You're going to give me a monthly price. I want a monthly price because my CFO needs a monthly budgeted price. Add the tiers in. If we go over that, then again, it goes from one point five percent to one point seven five percent or for example. That's what a lot of agencies are going to because the client does not want to deal with the percentage of spend because it's hard to calculate exactly what that's going to be.
Paul Sonneveld
Sorry, no, I completely agree. Yeah, I was on mute. There's a bit of music behind me here.
Scott Ohsman
It's Nashville. Always mute.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, it is. It's a guitar within five meters of any location, which is interesting. Actually, I'm not joking.
Scott Ohsman
I know. I told you, Jason Boyce, again, I'm name-dropping here. I was on a call with him this morning, and he was like, hold on, I can't hear you, because everywhere he was going was music.
Paul Sonneveld
I think it took me about twenty minutes just to find this spot as i said before reasonable wi-fi and quite enough to do a podcast or just completely bad planning on my part. Anyway, back to our topic
Scott Ohsman
Yeah.
Paul Sonneveld
I completely get your point around much easier to have a flat fee, right? Easier for everyone except for the incentivization bit and the end of partnership. Like how do you so if we talk about more the benefit of like it's just a fixed amount and let's take a long-term perspective. Playing devil's advocate, as a client how do i continue to incentivise you to to continue to drive my sales? How, because it sounds like this could just turn into you get paid the same amount whether you do a good or a bad job, right? What signals or incentives can you still put in front of that client to come for them around that particular topic?
Scott Ohsman
So that's a great point and a very common point. And it depends on the internal order structure and actually how their finances are set up and where they see their Amazon business in relation to other things. So great point is you can say, listen, I'm going to play this flat fee, excuse me, easy for me to say flat fee. But if we get the business from here to there, again, this is just, this is setting up incentives. If we go here, you guess what? I'm going to give you a raise. Okay. I will take the fee from X to Y. If we hit these different marks, or if you can keep my margin.
So a lot of other companies, if you drill down, it's like one of the most important things is my margin. I want my unit economics and my total P&L on Amazon. I've got to hit these marks. If you do so, guess what? I'm going to put an extra little kicker there at the end of the year. People have put together bonus programs, tiered programs, again, saying, here's your incentive. I'm paying you X amount a month. If you get it to here, which I think is an opportunity, and you stay within the budget of what it's going to cost to get those sales. And this is promotions, and this is advertising, and this is everything else. Then guess what? I'm going to give you a raise.
So I like those structures a lot more. And then let's just be honest. OK, a lot of these contractual agreements are for six six-month to a twelve-month lock. And I'm telling you, I've been through big, big ones. If somebody really wants to get out and you're not doing a good job and they want to move, I'm telling you, they're getting out. They're getting there. There's some loophole somewhere. Somehow they're getting out. That's just been my experience. They're good. They're necessary. I'm not against them.
I'm just saying the bottom line is if something is moving or there's things out of control, and that's why I don't like the revenue share because from the agency standpoint, just way too many risks. Sure, if you get a big hit, terrific. You get a big payday. What happens the next year? If you say I got this, there's too many variables you don't control as an agency. I can't. Hey, I did everything we're supposed to do. OK, we have everything. So they had a manufacturing and supply chain issue. They could not ship it. I'm out my percent. Yeah, I'm out. I'm out. I'm done. And it's a roller coaster ride. And Paul, as you and I have had breakfasts in Seattle when you come visit me, I don't like roller coasters. And you know what? CFOs and finance and C-suite people, they don't like roller coasters. They like gondolas that go up. And if you're going to tell me it's going to go down, I've got a very soft, safe landing.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. No, a hundred percent. I was actually bringing that up. I remember doing what I thought was a marvelous job for a client, only for them to just run out of stock due to really poor supply chain disciplines. And you carry all the risk. Of course, they have the risk of lost sales, but you know, you might still do quite a bit of work.
Scott Ohsman
Yeah. The other key from agency owners, and this is the truth. And this, when I started the Cairn company in 2013, back in that day, monthly retainers weren't even a thing like nobody was doing that. It was all percentage of revenue. We didn't have Ad right there, but it was all risk. And I said, listen, to a point, whether we sell a thousand widgets or we sell a hundred widgets, I still have to have the same overhead, the same costs to actually deliver that outcome. So I can't do it on a hundred percent revenue. I have to have a monthly fee that can cover a little bit of my headcount.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah. Ali Davey, thanks for your question, by the way. I'm just going to throw a real question in here because it really aligns with what I was going to ask next, which is, my experience when we used to do this, it used to take maybe, there's a lot of upfront work to be done, right? To get an account in a certain space, maybe you have to fix a whole bunch of listings, get inventory, right before you can really start to make good money, grow them, and actually for an account to be profitable.
And for us, that was typically around the six-month mark. It can be longer depending on all that. So how do you think about that from a pricing point of view? Obviously, one thing is to have long-term contracts. But as you said before, there's always a way out. The other way is, I think what Ali's asking about here is, how do you tackle the upfront work that agencies put in? If a client decides to move away from the partnership after three to six months, she's also senior. Sorry, go ahead. No, no, go ahead.
Scott Ohsman
A hundred percent, Ali and I was going to talk about that. Set up fees, one-time setup fees. Here's the truth, okay, agency owners? In the first thirty to sixty days, you're losing your ass. You're losing money on this thing. This is just how it is, because you're going to put so much time, so much, the onboarding, all of this stuff, you're going to over-index on effort, time, money, tech, all those things. So one way to alleviate that is to do a setup fee, a one-time setup fee, which very greatly, depending on the catalogue situation, depending on how it works. Put that into effect and get a one-time setup fee. That kind of hedges your bet.
So, in three months, if things don't work out for various reasons, then at least you've recovered a little bit of that. And the other thing is Ad Hoc. So in the monthly, you might have put up front the setup fee, but also say, listen, we're going to create content creative. We got a big structure. We're going to do your forecasting, modelling, whatever it is. And guess what? Here's the one-time project fee that we're going to put up against that to kind of cover. Does that answer the question?
Paul Sonneveld
It does to me. Maybe, Ali, if there's further questions, feel free to put them in the chat there.
Scott Ohsman
Oh, my friend Phil Adebimpe is there.
Paul Sonneveld
Right. Before we get to him, I just want to ask one follow-up question there, which is, you sort of got onto it, but managing client expectations, right? The client agrees to pay X. There's a certain amount of services that are going to be provided for X. There's always this wonderful thing called scope creep. And, you know, maybe the agency can just do me a favour or maybe they're not so busy and all that sort of stuff. And that can be a very slippery slope and lead to a very unprofitable account very quickly. Managing expectations right from the start. You know, what is best practice according to you, Scott?
Scott Ohsman
You do your best to set up expectations. And so this is a major disconnect because it depends on who you're talking to. This is why I always say agency, the pricing is so brutal because you're talking to a sales and marketing or an agency owner that is setting up and going to their teams and creating the price that they're going to charge. Then they get into execution. The production team, the account management team, the brand manager goes in and then you're talking to a different person. The process of contact in the client meeting was there with a decision maker, for example.
But the decision maker who said yes and signed the agreement or contract isn't in the day-to-day and doesn't understand. Once you get in, it's like remodelling a house. I pull one wall back, and I'm like, oh, my God, I got to rewire this entire thing. That wasn't built in the pricing because during the sales process, it's dating. They're selling you. You're selling them. Everybody's happy. You put together this pricing structure that everyone seems great. Then all of a sudden you get into it and you're like, oh my Lord, the account manager, the Ad team, the content team, the copier, everyone's like, this is a disaster. We're going to have to actually put in way more hours. We didn't get a setup fee. And so again, in that thirty, sixty days, no one's happy because you've lost a ton of money.
The expectation is on the sales and marketing side. And you have to be clear and try to do as best you can because you won't know everything. All the scraping tools, everything else is never going to tell you. Everyone thinks you can go and grow a business exponentially. And that's just not where we are on Amazon. There's outliers. There's disclaimers. There's unicorns. I get it. But this is the truth is the expectations and sales between the sales process and the actual account management onboarding. It depends who your point of contact is, who you're talking to, decision makers. That's where price problems come into problems.
Because the agency's like, I just spent so many hours and so many times, and we had to put all these teams on it. And the agency owner's like, wait a minute, did we not charge them enough? Well, no, you just, the sales process didn't uncover the seventeen thousand hours of work we had to do to get this thing up and running, to get where we're going, to hit even close to our incentive. So it's a constant, the account, whoever's talking every day has to make sure they level set this nonstop messaging is key here. Again, we'll, we did a little account management one last time. This is, this is on the, unfortunately this is on the brand owner, the account owner.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, no, no, it's managing expectations. And your point about just doing that proper discovery as part of the sales process, really trying to understand what's underneath the rug, right?
Scott Ohsman
There's amnesia here. This is the other thing that is just experience. And I think everybody here, my buddy Phil knows this. From the sales and marketing, depending if you have a different team, depending who it is, right? They have emails, you have all this stuff. You have all dthe ocumentation, slide decks, whatever. Then they get into the actual meat of the business. And for some reason, the client is like, has amnesia, doesn't remember any of the emails and comes into the forum and says, Hey, I'm paying for this. I'm paying for this. And the account manager is like, that's Ad Hoc. That's this. I've been told you're getting these set of services. Boom. You have instant conflict. You have expectation problems, and you probably don't have a happy, happy customer.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, which we might as well get to Phil's question now then actually. I'll get back to you in a sec, Ali. So Phil's initial, the question he's asked, and thanks for your question, Phil, really appreciate it. It makes this stuff a lot more interactive. I’m going to address it to you, Scott. What is the best way to protect agency income from clients who may be metering exceeding agreed upon KPIs but may feel full short of their commitments, right? So you might be smashing on sales, but maybe they're not giving you the inventory you need so you could have had a much bigger number and they're starting to have moving targets for what satisfactory performance really looks like.
Scott Ohsman
This is what I call friendly reminders. Your question is great, Phil. It's good to see you. I love you. The point here is that it's friendly reminders and who is involved in getting the account versus who's involved running the account. That's really the difference. And the KPIs, you have to upfront make sure we're all on the same page. And that's where the friendly reminders of, hey, listen, you said margin was the most important to you. Yeah, but your Ad spend, you didn't get me the sales. You didn't get me the high sales. Hey, hey. Friendly reminder, when we all got in the room together and we decided what we're, what our big goal was, it was margin, margin, margin. And that's what we've managed it to. That's what we're doing it to. That's what we're running. If that's changing, then guess what? We need to go relook at the paperwork and we need to have different incentives and different KPIs because we're not on the same page.
So this is a constant, this is why an account manager, brand managers, we've talked about Paul before. This job is so hard because you're the salesperson, you're the ops person, you're the marketing person, you're everything. And it's just really difficult to find somebody who can do all those. And then develop that trust relationship to call the client out and say, hey, whoa, whoa, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You're not doing, we're not doing that. You can't judge me on my ROAS one day and say I'm not doing it versus the profit margin or sales on the other day. We're not doing that. And that's a very difficult conversation. I've just gotten really good at it because I've done it a hundred times.
Paul Sonneveld
It's the, well, this is where the friendly, I mean, when you say friendly reminders, I'm assuming there's the word proactive embedded in there, right? You know, constantly in their ear, reminding them before they ask you, right? You don't want to be on the back foot on this stuff. So a hundred percent.
Before we close out, I just want to go back to Ali's question. She did have a follow-up question, which I think Phil has already shed some light on, but I'm just going to pop it up here for the benefit of this recording as well and our audience there. Back to upfront payments, right? And doing that sort of fee upfront. She's just asking a little bit of clarification around, is that a one-time fee based on Amazon revenue? Does it have to be profitable for both the agency and brand? What are your thoughts there?
Scott Ohsman
So that has, in my opinion, in my experience has nothing to do with their Amazon revenue. It's amount of what do you think? You have to make your best educated guess. What is my internal cost to meet that deliverable up front? And so the charge has to be applicable or referable to be fair to that. So is it a five thousand dollar one time one-time set-up fee? Because I'm going to I've already established in my research and the sales team and marketing that. I'm going to have to go redo catalogue work. I'm going to have to get several teams involved. We're going to have to put this much of resources on it. And at five thousand dollars, are we going to make one hundred percent margin there or fifty margin? Probably not. But it's going to offset because, you know, you unfortunately have to have risk scenarios all the time. We lose this client in three months. How bad is it going to be? The five thousand dollars of the one-time setup fee can can mitigate those risks a little bit. It's still gonna suck i'm like alley it's just still gonna be a bummer no matter what.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah.
Scott Ohsman
This is why, whether you do great work or you don't do very good work and you're charging money, it's frustrating because you could do the greatest work in the world and still get canned. Or you could not do a great job and stay on for five years. It just it completely depends on the situation and who's who's the decision maker and who's running it.
Paul Sonneveld
Yeah, a hundred percent. I many, many examples when back in the day, you know, particularly a change of agency personnel is probably the worst scenario, you know, because it's all down to relationships as well. Right. And how you collaborate a hundred percent. So Scott, as we close out a final question here, and I think it's the time, sitting in an event here at Amazon's again, making lots of announcements around AI and productivity improvements and more bells and whistles, which, on one hand, it's like Amazon's starting to do a lot of the agency work.
On the other hand, you're driving more complexity into their operating models, right? Which sort of requires more agency work. So what do you think? I mean, it's a much broader conversation and probably you've gone for a dedicated episode, but sort of just zooming into the pricing topic, right? What do you see if you were, crystal ball, 2026,2027, where do you see Amazon agency pricing heading models, and levels and what would be your take?
Scott Ohsman
Yeah, I think, so, the behind the scenes, these Ad tech platforms is really driving this percentage of revenue. I can see percentage of revenue actually not is kind of almost going away is what I see. I think the flat fee model for a size of business and appropriate resources to put to that business from the expertise driving that medium, that balancing act, excuse me, of not being too much where they can hire internal versus expertise. I think what you're going to see over time is the Ad tech competition is going to bring out where we're going to see dissolving these percentage of revenue on Ad spend. That is also going to allow agencies to go back to more flat fee or very low rev share. The platform is maturing. That's also a part of this. There's a confluence of AI and the services. I think the services that agencies perform today is going to change dramatically in the next year to eighteen months.
And I think Ad tech is about to hear some and the media buying and all those things. There's some disruption there. And Amazon Unboxed. At one point, they're making it easier to execute, and at the same time, they're making it way more complex with targeting and segmentation and all the other things from the Ad on the PPC and then DSP and all these other things. So you're going to need more expertise. I just think we're moving toward – and this could be my bias, Paul, because I can't stand percentage of revenue. I think it's the wrong incentive. It's just not a great win-win for all parties. And so I don't like it. It's just, you know what? How much is it going to be to do the work and do the best work you can? Tell me what that is, and let's move on. But I do think we're moving towards that more and more in the Amazon space.
Paul Sonneveld
I hope so too, because I fully agree with you that getting rid of that percentage does give agencies a lot more freedom on how they price going forward, which would lead to much better outcomes. Scott, we need to wrap it up here, but thank you so much for your valuable contributions, and as always, your deep passion about the subjects we're talking about, including pricing.
Just for our audience, when Scott and I were having breakfast a couple of months ago, and we spoke about this as a potential topic, it didn't take me long to convince him to do it. He bid at the topic. literally in a few seconds. As you can see, he's very passionate about it. So Scott, thank you so much. I know you're a busy guy, so I appreciate you jumping on and sharing your knowledge, you know, warts and all, and really giving it to us the way the world really operates in this space. So thank you so much. And I look forward to doing another episode.
Scott Ohsman
Fantastic. Thanks for having me back, Paul.
Paul Sonneveld
So that was a great discussion with Scott on one of the most important and challenging decisions that agency face, right? How do I really price my services? We spoke about a lot, right? Retainers, revenue share, productized models, and the trade-offs that come with each of those approaches. So if you join us live, especially Phil and Ali, thank you so much for participating for joining us, your questions, your insights. And for those of you that are catching this recording afterwards, don't forget to register for future episodes so you can take part in our live Q&A. That is a wrap for me here in Nashville. See you next time and take care.