What does a brand campaign actually cost?

July 2026 - Jordy Wedding

A brand campaign in the Netherlands can run anywhere from around five thousand euros to well over a hundred thousand and that huge spread is the honest answer because the price depends almost entirely on what you're actually asking for. Not a very satisfying number to open on, we know. But anyone who gives you a clean figure before they know the scope is either guessing or selling.

So what moves the number and what are you really paying for?

Creative is not media and that's where the confusion starts

The first thing worth untangling is that "campaign cost" is usually two very different budgets wearing the same coat. There's what it costs to make the campaign, the idea, the film, the design, the assets. And there's what it costs to put it in front of people, the media spend, the placements, the airtime. Those are not the same money and they don't scale together.

You can spend fifteen thousand making something beautiful and then two hundred thousand buying the media to run it nationally. Or you can spend that same fifteen thousand and put it out through your own channels for nothing. So when someone quotes a scary campaign number, a big chunk of it is often media, money that goes to Meta or the billboard company, not to the people who made the work. Always worth knowing which half you're being quoted.

What actually moves the creative number

Set media aside and the cost of the work itself comes down to scope, which really just means how much there is to make and how good it has to be.

A single-channel thing, one strong idea and a handful of social assets lives at the lower end. Call it five to fifteen thousand. The moment you add film you're in different territory because production, a crew, a director, a shoot day, an edit is where budgets genuinely climb and climb fast. A proper integrated campaign, concept plus film plus stills plus a full set of channel assets for a real brand will sit comfortably at twenty-five to a hundred thousand and up, depending on how far you want to push it. And that's all before anyone has bought a single ad.

The other cost drivers are the ones people forget. How many versions and formats do you need because forty tailored versions is a lot more work than one hero film. The calibre of the people actually on it. And usage rights, how long and where you're allowed to run the work, which sounds like admin but can move a number more than the shoot does.

What you're actually paying for

Here's the part nobody at a big agency really wants to say out loud. A meaningful slice of what you pay is not the work. It's the building the work happens in. The account layers, the junior who makes it and the senior who checks it and the director who checks them both, the markup, the overhead, the very nice office. On a lot of campaigns you're paying for a structure and the actual creative is a smaller line inside it than you'd expect.

That isn't a moral complaint, big agencies earn their place on the big jobs. But it's the reason two quotes for the same campaign can differ by a factor of three, and it's why the number often has more to do with who you hired than with what you asked for. When we look at a budget, the only question we really care about is how much of it is going into the work and how much is going into everything around the work.

So how should you think about your budget?

Backwards, honestly. Not "we've got thirty thousand, what can we get for it?," but "here's what this campaign needs to do, so what does that actually take?" Start from the job. The channels it genuinely needs to live on. Whether it truly needs film or whether stills and sharp design carry it just as well. How long it has to run. Price follows scope, so once the scope is real the number almost sets itself, and you stop paying for things the campaign never needed in the first place.

The honest short version. A brand campaign costs what its scope costs, the range is wide because scope is wide and the smartest move before you ask the price is to get clear on what you actually need it to do. Do that and the question quietly shifts from "what does it cost" to "what am I paying for," which was always the better question anyway.

If you're trying to work out what your campaign should realistically cost or you've got a quote in front of you and you're not sure what's work and what's overhead, that's a conversation we're always happy to have.