How to negotiate a PR agency contract

Negotiate the terms, not the rate. Retainer prices are fairly rigid (roughly $5,000 a month is the honest floor at Seed), but four terms are soft, and they decide more than the price does: a 90-day initial term, a kill fee that caps your exit cost, a cap on pass-through expenses, and a written reporting cadence. The leverage you hold before signing never comes back, so get all four into the draft before money moves.

Agencies hold the rate because it is the business model, but they will trade on terms, because the terms decide who carries the risk. Push there:

• Initial term - ask for 90 days, month-to-month after. PR shows a pulse in a quarter; a 12-month lock asks you to bet before you see one. What counts as fair lock-in, notice, and renewal is covered in the term-and-exit page.
• Kill fee - if you leave mid-term, you owe a defined fee, commonly one month, not the balance of the contract. Without it, a 30-day out clause still leaves you owing the remaining months.
• Expense caps - wire distribution, monitoring tools, and media databases get billed through on top of the retainer, sometimes with a markup. Hidden markups on agency pass-throughs are a well-documented industry problem, enough that the ANA issued model contract language to curb them, so cap the monthly pass-through total, require approval above it, and strike any markup on expenses.
• Reporting - a named cadence and format in the contract, not a promise from the sales call. What the report has to let you audit is the scope-of-work page's job.

Two clauses to edit directly in the draft. Strike any line guaranteeing placements; the guaranteed-coverage-warning page explains why that language means paid content, not earned media. And add an ownership clause stating that media lists, messaging docs, and accounts built on your retainer are yours at exit, per the what-you-keep page.

How the agency responds is itself a vetting signal. One that expects to earn the renewal accepts a short term and a kill fee without drama. One that fights for a year of lock-in is negotiating against its own results.

You can skip the rate haggle entirely by choosing an agency that publishes its prices. PressFriendly's plans are on the pricing page.