The RFP That Gets You Good Bids
Episode 2 of 10
Most video RFPs are missing the one thing that would get you comparable quotes. Here’s what to put in.
More on this: how to brief a video production company.
Transcript
We can usually tell inside one read whether an RFP was written by someone who knows what production costs. The budget number isn’t what gives it away. What gives it away is asking for a lot, very fast, for very little, all three at once, which tells us nobody has priced the labour, the rentals, the insurance or the edit.
That’s not a criticism, it’s a fixable problem, and the fix is a shorter list than you’d think.
Your deadline, and whether it’s flexible. That single line tells us how many hours a day the job takes and whether it means nights and weekends. We’ve turned commercials around in two weeks. We’d just rather know that’s what we’re doing.
What kind of project it is, with a reference. Send something you like and tell us why you like it. One caveat. If you know the budget is modest and you send us an Apple commercial, you’re going to be disappointed, and so are we. Find work at the level you can fund.
How much creative you need from us. Is the concept locked? Do you need a script? Storyboards? When an agency briefs us they usually bring boards. Direct clients usually don’t, and that’s fine, it’s just a different job and a different number.
Anything you’re not free to change. A specific location, particular talent, a landmark that has to be in shot, a time of day. Those constraints are the expensive part, and they’re the part people leave out. On one shoot the client wanted a product explosion showing every internal piece of the thing. That was around forty hours of VFX for motion tracking, texturing, relighting and colour matching. A screen replacement takes a few hours. Both are “some VFX” in an RFP.
One more thing about timing, because it’s the constraint people treat as free. Come to us early. Not because we want a long lead, but because a deadline you can’t move is the thing that quietly reprices everything else. If the date is fixed and the scope is fixed, the only variable left is how many people we throw at it, and that’s the expensive lever. Told six weeks out, we can often solve it with planning instead. Told ten days out, we solve it with bodies.
There’s an old triangle in this trade. Good, fast, cheap. You get two. That sounds like a line until you’re reading an RFP that asks for all three at once, and the honest thing to say is that we’d be losing money on it, which helps nobody.
And then the one everybody argues about. Your target budget.
The objection is that you’re trying to get bids, so why show your hand. Fair. But video gets made at genuinely different levels, and without a number we’re guessing which one you want. A range is plenty. Then flip it around and ask us what quality that range buys, with a sample. That’s the question that protects you.
One last thing, and it’s the part that saves everybody time. Tell us who signs it off. Not who’s writing the brief, who approves the final cut. If that’s a committee, say so, because a committee changes the schedule more than any creative decision in the document. Two rounds of revisions with one decision maker is a different job from two rounds with five, and we’d both rather know that before we quote than discover it in week three.
We’re Luma Creative, a video production company in San Francisco. If you’ve got something coming up and you want a straight answer on what it takes, we’re at lumacreative.com.