The Skin Game

The final slide of the pitch. Every time. The room has heard two hours of our promises, and bigger promises still from competitors we didn't believe could keep them. So I would close with the refrain: we stand by our work, and we're willing to put skin in the game.

The pause. The nods. In my years running global pitches for Publicis Groupe, that line and the commitments behind it closed more rooms than any case study we ever showed.

The industry has since given it a clinical name: outcomes-based pricing. I still prefer skin in the game. But five weeks ago, in The Costless Commitment, I asked a question about the clinical version: would you tie your agency's remuneration to outcomes neither of you can measure?

After an award was made in principle and the procurement and commercial teams worked through the MSA, skin in the game resolved into something more careful. Our desire to put compensation at the risk of our performance was, in every case, greater than the desire of clients to risk that we would be successful. What survived into the contract was always a base fee with the outcomes layer on top affecting bonus and malus.

Some ten years since I first recall closing a pitch with this commitment, with better technology, better data and the most sophisticated measurement infrastructure the industry has ever owned, the contracts haven't really moved on. This week produced the receipts.

On 6 August, presenting WPP's first-half results, Cindy Rose told Digiday's Sam Bradley that outcome-based pay is a pillar of her turnaround. Jaguar Land Rover is, so far, the only client actually paying that way. Her timeline: "I suspect it will take a few years." The interim is a mixed economy of commercial models.

Yesterday, Ad Age's excellent Ewan Larkin published the piece that explains why. His reporting found that pure outcomes-based pricing is "exceedingly rare" and that what gets marketed as outcomes-based is usually an output fee with a performance measure layered on top. 69% of agencies told his sources that agreeing an attribution methodology is a critical or strong barrier. Another 69% named procurement itself. And the detail that made me put my coffee down: per Ad Age's reporting, even WPP's flagship JLR deal includes a principal-media hedge to offset the fee risk WPP is taking.

Rose's candour is creditable. She is running the industry's most watched turnaround, she made outcome-based pay a pillar of it in February, and six months later she stood up and published the honest timeline rather than the convenient one.

And the data confirms what I see from the client's chair and my CMO network and what every recent deal I'm aware of confirms: the gravity of the industry has wholly moved, from inputs (hours of expensive people) to outputs (scopes, deliverables, priced work). That migration is real and largely complete. But outcomes? Outcomes live in the bonus and malus clauses. The seasoning, not the meal. The core of how a partner gets paid remains untouched.

The interesting question is why. And the honest answer requires turning the whole debate upside down. Three inversions.

The 69% procurement figure gets reported as friction. Read it again from the client side of the table.

Larkin's reporting surfaced the slippery slope: an agency that overperforms and earns more can find itself flagged by procurement as too expensive. Marketers call this perverse. It isn't. Procurement is paid to flag cost anomalies and manage risks (and I say this having sat across from people who procured marketing services alongside packaging cardboard and energy and the function's historic under-specialisation in our category is precisely why the model stalls there). A fee that scales with performance produces cost anomalies by design. The function isn't obstructing the model but doing precisely the job the CFO gave it.

Outcomes pricing is sold as the agency accepting risk. Now list what the client is asked to accept.

Open your sales data to a counterparty whose bonus depends on how it's read (the access 68% of agencies say they can't get), and which clients withhold for governance reasons that are mostly good ones. Agree what "incremental" means with a partner whose fee depends on the answer. And I'll say this as someone who now runs a frozen food portfolio: in any given quarter, weather, retailer range reviews and commodity inflation move my volume more than advertising does. Handing an agency accountability for outcomes means first agreeing which outcomes were ever theirs to move. That negotiation is harder than the pitch was.

Then there's the tell. Listen to the seller's own case for the model. Rose's argument, in her words to Digiday, is that moving off time-and-materials releases her from staffing plans, enables a hybrid workforce of humans and agents, and cuts cost-to-serve. WPP now employs around 97,400 people, down from roughly 105,900 a year ago. This is a company that needs revenue decoupled from headcount, because the headcount is going one way.

I understand the argument. Parts of it I'd make myself. But notice what it is: a margin story, told internally, wearing an alignment story to meetings. The client is being invited to underwrite the seller's cost transition and to call it partnership. When the case for "your interests and ours, aligned at last" is the seller's own cost structure, the buyer should read the contract twice.

Which brings me to the JLR insurance policy, and here I'm going to defend it.

Michael Duda of Bullish made the point sharply in the comments under Larkin's post: these deals are floored with a solid base fee covering labour costs as a minimum, with the outcomes layer on top. Capped downside makes them bonus schemes, not risk transfer. He's right.

Time-and-materials didn't survive forty years of commercial evolution because nobody had a better idea. It survived because it is the only model that makes agency revenue predictable, auditable and bankable which, at the time, are the three properties a listed company's guidance depended on. An outcomes book of business is a volatility book. No CFO of a public company can sign an unhedged one, for the same reason no insurer writes policies without reinsurance. The floor under our old "skin in the game" deals and the hedge under WPP's new one are the same instrument, a decade apart. They are not hypocrisy. They are the only part of the promise that was ever fully sincere.

There is a version of the future where this changes, but it requires the attribution problem actually solved, a shared receipt both parties trust, which is the deterministic-identity argument I made in The Costless Commitment and won't repeat here. But even a perfect receipt only proves what happened after exposure. It doesn't referee what would have happened anyway. Until something neutral does, every outcomes contract will carry a floor, and every floor quietly converts the revolution back into a bonus scheme.

So here is where I've landed: the industry doesn't need to invent outcomes-based compensation. It already runs on it. It's called the pitch.

Think about what actually happens to an agency that delivers. The client doesn't tear up the fee schedule and pay double. The client does something worth far more: nothing. No review. No procurement-led benchmarking exercise. No eighteen-week defence of the business at terms you'd never have offered. In The Retention Trophy I argued that the client who never appears on any pitch tracker is the best outcome in this business. They are grown organically, served by teams nobody writes about. Invert it and the compensation system comes into focus. The outcome being priced is trust. The payment is tenure. The penalty clause is the review.

By that reading, the league table that matters isn't who's winning new business. It's who has the least to defend. On Bank of America's estimates, WPP currently has about $3 billion of media billings under review, the most of any holding company, anchored by the $1.4 billion Coca-Cola decision expected in the autumn. In this sense, WPP is already living with outcomes-based compensation.

The industry spent this week debating whether outcomes-based pricing will arrive in a few years. It arrived decades ago. It just doesn't settle in fees. It settles in account tenure, and the invoices go out quarterly from procurement, priced in trust.

Which is what I was really selling with that closing refrain, though I couldn't have articulated it then. The clients who leaned in when I said skin in the game weren't buying a fee mechanic. They were buying the willingness to be judged and the signal that we'd sit still for the measurement, whatever it showed.

That willingness already has a price, and every agency in the industry is paying it or collecting it right now, at the review table, whether or not the word "outcomes" appears anywhere in the contract.

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Originally published on 13 August 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn. The text above is as published, with one change: the original subscribe line, which pointed to LinkedIn, has been replaced with the subscribe block above.