How Indian Agencies Actually Make Money Now
Every conversation about the state of Indian advertising eventually becomes a conversation about money, and then stops short of the part that matters.
How agencies actually make money has changed far more than the work has, and most arguments about creative quality are really arguments about a payment model nobody has replaced.
What replaced commission
Nothing that works as well. The old media commission tied an agency’s income to the size of the spend, which was crude and at least predictable. Retainers replaced it with a fixed fee against an unfixed scope, which is the arrangement most agencies are still losing money inside.
Project fees look cleaner and behave worse. They remove the floor, so a good year is a sequence of unconnected wins and a quiet quarter is a hole nothing fills.
Neither model prices the thing clients say they value. Thinking is charged by the hours it takes rather than by what it is worth, which is the only professional service in the country still priced that way after the output has been agreed.
Where agencies actually make money instead
Production, increasingly, and the volume kind rather than the prestige kind. Adaptations, versioning, social output and always-on content are unglamorous, repeatable and priced per unit, which is why so many agencies have quietly become production houses that also write.
What this does to the work
It moves the incentive from one expensive idea to many cheap assets, and it rewards the agency that can deliver quantity on time over the one that argues for a better route. That is not a creative failure. It is the pricing working exactly as designed.
Anyone frustrated by what agencies produce should look first at what agencies are paid for, because the second reliably explains the first.