Glossary
Retainer vs project: how should you buy video?
A video retainer buys ongoing production capacity at an agreed cadence and cost. A project buys a defined set of deliverables once, for a fixed fee.
The choice is usually framed as a budgeting question and is actually a strategy question. A project makes sense when you need to prove one thing once — a launch, a rebrand, a single campaign. A retainer makes sense when the thing you are trying to change takes repeated exposure, which describes most B2B positioning problems.
The economics differ in a way that is easy to miss. On a project, production planning happens once and is amortised across one set of deliverables. On a retainer it happens once and is amortised across a year, which is why cost per asset falls sharply after the first quarter and why comparing a retainer’s monthly fee against a single project fee is the wrong comparison.
The comparison
| Retainer | Project | |
|---|---|---|
| You are buying | Ongoing capacity at a cadence | A defined deliverable set |
| Cost per asset | Falls over time | Fixed at commissioning |
| Visual consistency | Builds across the year | Per project |
| Planning overhead | Once, then amortised | Every time |
| Best when | Positioning needs repeated exposure | One thing needs proving once |
| Risk | Under-using booked capacity | Restarting from scratch each time |
| Typical structure | Monthly, or quarterly shoot days | Fixed scope and fee |
Which one fits your situation
- Long sales cycles with multiple stakeholders — retainer. One film cannot carry a six-month evaluation.
- A launch, rebrand or single campaign — project. There is a defined thing to prove.
- An active social channel — retainer. Channels die from running out of material in week three, not from shooting too rarely.
- Uncertain internal buy-in — project first. Prove it works, then move to cadence.
- You keep commissioning ad hoc — you are already paying retainer money without the consistency or the cost-per-asset benefit.
In practice
DOT works both ways and structures retainers around actual volume rather than fixed packages. For Rompslomp, an always-on partnership produces podcast episodes and customer films on a consistent cadence, each hero piece generating a full package of platform cutdowns — content that compounds across the calendar rather than spending itself in a launch week.
See retainer and project structures on the B2B video page.
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