Double Commission
Some people will know exactly what this means when they see the title. If you’re an agency employee (like me) and work on a salary, you’ve probably never heard of this dark and ugly underbelly of advertising that puts kids through school and coke habits strong.
Double commission is the practice of charging a client for commission twice. This is a fairly foreign concept to me but from what I understand, it can be done in a couple of ways. A media shop is hired to plan and buy media. That shop takes a commission off the top, then hands the work off to another media shop to do the actual planning and buying. Shop #2 creates the plan and pads the CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) to include their own commission. The client ends up paying commission twice without knowing it. The other method is where an agency tells publishers that they only want to see gross numbers of the proposal that they provide, that is, with the 15% commission already in the CPMs. The agency can then hand this off as being the net (not inclusive of commission).
That’s what double commission is.