Embracing ‘Gig Economy’, Solvate Says Snub the Agency, Reach the Talent
ADOTAS – A couple of years ago, Daily Beast editor Tina Brown co-opted the term gig from the music and theater realm to give a superlative to toiling through the recession economy: the “gig economy.”
“Gigs: a bunch of free-floating projects, consultancies, and part-time bits and pieces they try and stitch together to make what they refer to wryly as ‘the Nut’—the sum that allows them to hang on to the apartment, the health-care policy, the baby sitter, and the school fees,” she wrote.
Gig is not necessarily a derogatory term, but it suggests a one-off event, a job that will hopefully lead to something better. In the parlance of musicians, a gig is just a gig; a show (or, praise the gods, a tour) is something to get excited about.
Brown, however, was arguing that for well-educated people — not just high-school droupouts — jumping from gig to gig, paycheck to paycheck, with little chance for stable employment is becoming the norm. Where once a college degree pretty much guaranteed a steady job and middle-class salary, we’re increasingly becoming an economy of struggling freelancers, held hostage by mysterious financial gatekeepers.
But there’s an opposite side to this coin, one that’s highly visible in the advertising agency space, according to marketing freelance network Solvate. A recent survey (PDF) by the company suggested agencies mark up hourly labor costs by 141% on average. (Hey, I watch “Mad Men” — that markup covers all the alcohol and cigarettes consumed during the creative process.)
The below infographic breaks down where all these markups come in, and even introduces a hourly markup multiplier by position (the average across the board is 3.5%). Solvate is promoting its new Agency Rate Card Review, a free service that promises to assess how much a company could save through bypassing the agencies and working with vetted freelancers in Solvate’s network (after being approved, there’s a $1,000 annual fee to get listed in Solvate’s community).
So if the working masses are stuck in a gig economy, Solvate’s saying (while pointing in the agencies’ direction) cut out the middlemen that’s adding to cost without adding value. By providing smart and direct hookups between the marketing talent and the companies that need them, the company may be reviving the true promise of the gig — a job that leads to something better.
Reader Comments.
Wow, it seems like everyone has a fancy infographic these days. Is THE OATMEAL to blame for this?
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