2 creatives, 2 weeks, 2 ideas for €200k: inside Rosa Paris’s new quickfire model
Rosa Paris is offering an out-of-the-box creative services package to startup clients. It’s fast-speed, no-nonsense and cuts costs – but can it work?
Rosa Paris’ co-founders explain how its new client offer can pull in new business / Rosa Paris
French agency Rosa Paris has made a unique offer to new clients – the chance to hire a pair of its top creatives for just two weeks for an upfront fee. The pair will deliver two original creative ideas, guaranteed. Rosa’s co-founders say this would help them dodge the intensive pitch process and save clients time.
The Havas-owned agency, formerly known as Rosapark, is marketing this unusual service as Joia, an alternative to a retained agency for time-poor clients that aren’t interested in long-term partnerships. It’s all about one-shots here.
”We are convinced that time is not your ally,” Jean-Patrick Chiquiar, co-founder of Rosa Paris, tells The Drum. Instead, Joia will help brands tackle ”a specific problem, with a specific solution, quickly and in a collaborative way. Time is an element that creates too many questions, and we wanted to have an offer that is a concentrated approach.”
Joia offers ”instant creativity” for brands after a ”one-shot” campaign for activation. Clients of Joia will get access to two of Rosa’s top creatives for two or three weeks and receive two creative ideas – a rebrand, a campaign, a repositioning – suited to their needs, working within a framework the agency dubs ’Quick&Strike.’
Chiquiar says that pricing will be variable, but will probably hover between €150,000 and €200,000 ($153,000-$206,000).
The service offers the agency a route to a new client set and could reduce the cost of finding new business by avoiding pitches and requiring fees upfront. For clients operating outside the traditional conventions of business, it offers a chance to create quality advertising creative in a fraction of the time usually required.
”We think advertising needs some fresh air. This new offer is, for us, a way to do it in a more simple, quick and instinctive way,” says Jean-François Sacco, co-founder and co-chief creative officer.
New client base
So far, Rosa has produced work for several clients with its new service – including plant-based meat brand HappyVore and startup Transmissio.
The service’s target market, Chiquiar explains, is ”brands that are in startup mindsets, that are not used to working with traditional agencies. With [Transmission and HappyVore], we were developing their first-ever campaigns.”
Though not all the brand challenges Joia will aim to solve will involve TV spots or display campaigns, it will be aimed at businesses that want to rapidly increase consumer awareness.
Initially, Joia will hook clients up with a small pool of Rosa’s top creative directors. Each pair will include one of its co-founders or managing directors, and a strategist, planner or creative. Sacco says they’ll work closer than usual with clients, presenting them with ideas and the option to move forward as and when they emerge. ”We’re not going to wait until our guys come back after two weeks for a debrief. We work in instant resolution – it’s kind of instant work.”
Chiquiar says the agency will take only one or two clients at a time initially, but will expand both the team on Joia and its potential base of clients over the coming months. ”Solving complicated problems” in a short space of time, Chiquiar says, will be ”pretty intense” for the creatives involved, so the team will have to work hard to avoid burning staff out.
Hook and line
If a client wants to take one of the two proffered concepts forward, they can then contract Rosa on a retained basis. ”If they want to go into production then we will enter into a classical relationship,” says Chiquiar. The agency has found with the first Quick&Strike clients that it took the same time to create new campaign ideas that it had working with retained clients – but they managed to avoid the pitching process, saving them months. ”Generally, you spend two months doing your pitch, choosing your agency and then starting to collaborate. We absolutely want to change that.”
In addition to saving both businesses time, Joia requires clients to pay upfront. ”We need to have a clear financial commitment from the client at the beginning,” says Chiquiar. ”There are too many pitches where no decision is taken at the end of the pitch; there are too many pitches where there are too many agencies; there are too many pitches where there is no compensation at the end. We need to make brands think again about where the value is.
”It’s a new deal with clients; we’ll bring value if you show that you are able to pay for value. If not, we won’t spend a minute on the project.”
He suggests that Joia could also offer clients a new route into long-term partnerships with the agency. ”It’s a hook to create a relationship with a brand that is not used to working with traditional agencies. They’ll have the first taste of creativity with the agency, and then they’ll want to meet us at every dinner.”
Despite the smaller time commitment from clients, Chiquiar and Sacco don’t see Joia as a low-cost option. Instead, it’s a ”concentrated” dose of what Rosa can provide – the agency equivalent of a restaurant tasting menu.
”In our business plan ... we imagine that Joia will represent approximately 15% of our revenue in the next few years, meaning we will identify 15-20 subjects per year to develop with this type of format, with two or four weeks per session,” says Chiquiar.
”It’s not at all a low-cost approach. The main objective is to have some of the best resources of the agency working for a very short time and find you a solution. Its value is based on that. It’s a very concentrated model.”