Opinion: Perspective - The remuneration riddle will not be solved soon.

At a recent IPA council meeting, the subject of agency margins came up. One media agency chief admitted that they were finding it hard to get margins up to the 30 per cent mark, at which point creative agency bosses around the table choked on their industrial-strength coffee and wondered where it all went wrong. (One answer: 1989, when the launch of Zenith marked the death of the full-service agency.)

Clearly, the different quarters of the advertising industry are not grappling with quite the same issues when it comes to margins, profits and remuneration. But, as predicted, last week's US ruling on the former Ogilvy & Mather executives Shona Seifert and Thomas Early has thrown another intense spotlight on the issue of agency remuneration.

So, how to get paid a fair whack for the magic that great agencies can conjure? There seems to be a general consensus that timesheets (O&M's downfall) are not the way forward. More and more agencies are negotiating fee payments, topped up by bonuses based on the client's own business performance and pre-agreed criteria against which the effectiveness of the agency's work will be judged.

All of which might well help move advertising on from a commodity service purchased on a crude time/cost ratio, and recognise the impact that great advertising can have on a brand's overall business performance.

But it still fails to address the real issues. As a collection of highly tuned, creative, intelligent people, agencies are well placed to provide long-term money-making ideas for clients that increasingly do not have to have their heart in a simple above-the-line advertising approach Quite how clients can (be encouraged to) reward this sort of creative intellectual input into their business remains a conundrum.

Of course, it has always been so. Take the old, oft-quoted example of Leo Burnett and its invention of the Jolly Green Giant character. It wasn't an ad, but an entire branding ...