Reading campaign case studies rates with a sceptical eye

People read published campaigns hoping to reverse-engineer a price. It almost never works, and the reasons it does not work are more useful than the number would have been.

This page is about what a case study can and cannot tell you about money. How to read one generally is in campaign case studies, and what actually sets a price is in rates and negotiation.

What to take away

Why the number is not there, and would not help

Confidentiality. Most agreements restrict what either side may say about commercial terms. What survives into a published document is the part both parties agreed to release.

Aggregation. Where a figure does appear it is usually a campaign total: partner fees, production, agency time and paid media behind the assets, combined. Two campaigns with the same total can have completely different fee structures.

Selection. Published campaigns are the ones that worked well enough to publish. Pricing inferred from them is pricing inferred from successes, which is survivorship bias applied to a budget line.

The invisible terms. A fee means nothing without the rights and exclusivity attached. A large number for a short organic license and a smaller number for perpetual worldwide use with a year of category exclusivity are not comparable, and no case study states either.

Time. A figure from an earlier year describes a market that has moved and a set of formats that may not exist.

What you can legitimately take from one

The pattern: take the shape, leave the number. A brand that copies the structure of a campaign it admires and prices it from its own scope will do far better than one that anchors on a figure from a trade article.

Reading a published figure when there is one

Occasionally a number appears. Three questions before it enters a spreadsheet.

Is it a fee to partners, or a campaign total? These differ by a large multiple and the wording rarely distinguishes them.

What rights did it buy? If the document does not say, the number is uninterpretable, because the single largest driver of a sponsorship fee is not stated.

Who published it, and what do they sell? A figure released by a party that benefits from the number looking high, or low, is a marketing artifact. The general reason to distrust aggregate industry pricing claims is that the sample is self-selected, which is ordinary selection bias.

What to do instead of inferring a price

Price from your own scope. Write down exactly what you want made, where it may run, for how long, and what you are locking. Then ask what that costs, from more than one partner, and compare the answers to each other rather than to a published figure.

Keep your own history in a form you can compare later: scope, rights, term, exclusivity, fee, and what happened.

After a handful of campaigns, that record is worth more than anything published, because it is measured on your product and your offer.

What to capture for comparability comes from campaign briefs and the terms recorded in contracts and disclosure.

Be honest about what a good result costs you to find out. A case study reporting a strong return says nothing about the returns of the campaigns that team did not publish.

It cannot tell you the average, and the average is what a budget is planned against. That is a measurement question, in measurement and ROI.

Bottom line

Published campaigns almost never disclose a usable price. When they do, the figure is a total that hides the split between fees, production, and media. It says nothing about rights or exclusivity, where the money actually goes.

Take the structure and scope. Price it against your own requirements. Build an internal record that is comparable to itself.

Common questions

Are industry benchmark reports better than case studies for pricing?

Marginally, for vocabulary. They are still self-selected samples published by interested parties, and they still ignore rights.

Why do brands not publish what they paid?

Confidentiality clauses, competitive reasons, and the fact that a published figure becomes a floor in every subsequent negotiation.

Can you ask a peer directly?

Often, and people answer in conversation what they will not write down. Ask about scope and rights alongside the number, or the answer is not comparable.

Does a very high published budget indicate anything?

That the campaign included production and media, usually. It is rarely a statement about partner fees.

What is the most useful thing to record internally?

Fee alongside rights, term and exclusivity, in the same row. Almost nobody does this, and it is what makes your own history usable.