When Australian businesses engage creative agencies, one of the first structural questions is whether to work on a project basis or an ongoing relationship. Both have legitimate uses. But the choice between them — and the reasoning behind it — reveals a great deal about how a business thinks about brand and creative investment.
This article is not an argument for either model exclusively. It is a framework for thinking clearly about which structure serves your business goals — and when to shift from one to the other.
1. What Project Engagements Are Good For
Project engagements are the right structure when the scope is well-defined, the output is specific, and the need is discrete. A brand identity project, a website redesign, a campaign for a product launch — these are all cases where a project structure makes sense. There is a clear brief, a clear deliverable, and a clear end point.
Project work is also appropriate when you are working with an agency for the first time and want to evaluate the relationship before committing to something ongoing. A well-scoped project is a useful test of an agency’s process, communication, and output quality.
2. What Ongoing Relationships Are Good For
Ongoing relationships are the right structure when brand and creative work is continuous, when the volume of work makes project scoping inefficient, and when consistency and accumulated brand knowledge are commercially valuable.
An agency partner on an ongoing relationship develops deep familiarity with the brand — the voice, the visual system, the strategic context, the competitive landscape. This accumulated knowledge means that work produced later in the relationship is faster, more on-brand, and more strategically informed than equivalent work produced at the start of a project engagement.
3. The Hidden Cost of Perpetual Project Engagements
Businesses that run all their creative work as discrete projects incur a hidden cost that is rarely calculated: the cost of onboarding. Every new project with a new agency — or even a returning agency after a gap — requires re-establishing context. The brand brief, the competitive context, the stakeholder preferences, the approved visual system, the tone of voice — all of this needs to be re-communicated.
For businesses with significant creative needs, this onboarding cost is substantial. It reduces the quality of early-stage work, extends timelines, and requires more intensive internal review. An ongoing relationship eliminates this cost.
4. The Retainer Model: What It Is and Isn’t
The ongoing relationship model in creative services is often structured as a retainer — a monthly commitment of time or output in exchange for a fixed fee. The retainer model works best when the volume of work is relatively predictable, the relationship is genuinely ongoing (not a project in monthly installments), and the agency has sufficient context to work with minimal briefing for routine deliverables.
The retainer model breaks down when the work is actually a series of discrete projects that would be better scoped individually, or when the client’s volume of work is too variable to predict monthly.
5. When to Start With a Project and Transition to Ongoing
The most natural progression for many agency-client relationships is to start with a significant project — brand strategy, identity, website — and then transition to an ongoing relationship for the execution, campaign, and maintenance work that follows.
This structure has a clear commercial logic. The foundational project establishes the strategy and system. The ongoing relationship applies it consistently over time, maintaining the coherence and momentum that make brand investment compound rather than decay.
6. How to Evaluate an Ongoing Creative Relationship
An ongoing creative relationship should be evaluated differently from a project. The relevant questions are not just “is the output good?” but “is the relationship getting more valuable over time?” and “is the agency becoming more effective as they accumulate brand knowledge?” If the answer to these questions is no after six to twelve months, the relationship structure needs to be reviewed.
7. Structuring a Hybrid Approach
Many businesses find that a hybrid approach works best: a defined ongoing relationship for strategic and brand work, with discrete projects for specific campaigns or deliverables that require specialist skills not covered by the retainer. This structure provides the consistency benefits of an ongoing relationship without requiring the retainer to cover every possible creative need.
8. Making the Right Decision for Your Business
The right structure depends on your volume of creative need, your budget predictability, your internal capacity to manage agency relationships, and the maturity of your brand. There is no universal answer — but there is almost always a right answer for your specific situation.
Read next: B2B Brand Strategy in Australia, What a Brand Strategy Process Actually Delivers, The True Cost of a Cheap Brand.
If you are unsure which structure is right for your business — or if your current agency engagement is not delivering the value it should — The Animals works with Australian businesses to structure brand and creative investment for maximum commercial return. Talk to The Animals about your brand investment →
