Incentive bonuses and agency relationship length: two separate ANA studies

Among large United States advertisers who belong to the Association of National Advertisers, reported use of result-based incentives fell in two successive comparisons across three survey readings. Fee models became more common between 2016 and 2022. The last edition of that survey with figures the public can open is the eighteenth, released in 2022, from a series the association has run for more than fifty years. It put result-based incentives at 41 percent of respondents, down from 48 percent in 2016 and 61 percent in 2013. Between 2016 and 2022 the share of respondents using fee models in at least one agency agreement rose from 68 percent to 82 percent. These categories can overlap: ANA describes incentives as a supplement to fees. Over this common interval, incentive use fell by 7 percentage points and fee-model use rose by 14 percentage points. These changes do not show one replacing the other.

A nineteenth edition came out in November 2025 and rests on answers from 99 member companies. Those figures stay closed. The compensation figures in this brief are the public reading from 2022. The sample is large United States advertisers who are members of the association, and it does not describe freelancers, five-person shops, or agencies in other countries. This brief presents separate indicators of agency compensation and client relationships. They do not measure the prevalence or outcomes of startup deals that pay a share of results.

What buyers say about incentives

Most of the marketers in the eighteenth edition answer that they do not know whether result-based incentives improve their agency’s work. The eighteenth edition does not say the incentives failed. Difficulty assessing the bonus could help explain the decline in its use, but that is a hypothesis, not a motive established by these responses. Among advertisers spending 500 million dollars a year or more, the share using a fixed fee or a fee tied to the volume of work jumped from 5 percent in 2016 to 53 percent. That change concerns one fee category among the largest spenders. Across all respondents and fee models, the share went from 68 percent to 82 percent.

Kompantsev’s startup agreements

Ilarion Kompantsev, founder of K&K Advertising Ltd, says his reward is a share of the result rather than a monthly fee, and that he takes those deals with startups directly. In the publication’s questionnaire he wrote that under such a contract the first thing that changes is the right to choose the client. He is included here as an example of this type of agreement, not as proof that it works. His results are not published. The company’s registration record can be checked in the public register: K&K Advertising Ltd was registered in the United Kingdom on 7 November 2022, under company number 14465695, and he is listed as a person with significant control. ANA measures incentive bonuses that can supplement a fee; that is not the same as Kompantsev’s stated arrangement. Its survey of large United States advertisers cannot establish how common that arrangement is among startups.

A separate study of relationship length

On 30 April 2025 the association and the 4As published a separate study of how long client and agency relationships last. Average tenure stood at about seven years, against 3.2 years in 2016. The two reports do not establish that they followed the same companies or that longer relationships replaced bonuses. The later figure is given as about seven years, not as a single exact mean published to one decimal place in the public release.

Mandatory reviews are reported by 40 percent of client respondents. Separately, the release cites earlier Cost of the Pitch studies for the average cost of one pitch to a client: $408,500.

The cost of inaction is explored separately in What doing nothing costs. Here, the compensation survey records lower incentive use and higher fee use, while the separate tenure study reports longer relationships. These observations do not establish that advertisers substituted relationship length for bonuses or why they changed their arrangements. Kompantsev uses a contract shape based on shared results, but he operates without published data to prove its efficacy.