Campaign Brief WA Agency of the Year Block takes on the billing model with UnBlock

When Campaign Brief WA named Block its Agency of the Year for 2025, the citation was notable for what it emphasised. Not scale. Not a single standout campaign. Not a trophy haul. Jury Chair Gayle While, Chief Executive Officer of Havas Host Sydney, put it plainly: “Their remuneration innovation demonstrates leadership in fixing broken agency commercial models and in exploring ways to ensure that creative agencies maintain value.”

In an industry that talks constantly about transformation, Block had actually done some. The result is UnBlock

Agency co-founder Mark Braddock explains UnBlock as a subscription operating model that replaces project-by-project commissioning with a single annual commitment, and in doing so, eliminates the friction that quietly corrodes most agency-client relationships.

“The friction in question isn’t the big stuff. It’s not the contract dispute or the pitch gone wrong. It’s the small stuff,” said Braddock. “The accumulated weight of minor negotiations on minor jobs that shouldn’t require negotiation at all. The scope conversation on the social post. The estimate for the EDM. The two emails and a meeting to approve something that takes four hours to make. Multiply that across a year of projects and what you have isn’t a relationship. It’s a series of small transactions held together by goodwill that is slowly running out.”

Simon Lamplough, Chief Customer Officer of Kitchen Warehouse and the client who co-created UnBlock with the Block team, identified this precisely.

“I found that it was those little small, niggly projects, the ones that should be fast and easy, that actually became slow and hard when we ended up debating and haggling,” he said. “And so UnBlock has just removed that.”

What replaces those negotiations is a single commercial decision made once, annually. Every outcome – brand strategy, campaign development, a week of a Creative Director’s undivided attention – is priced and comparable before the work begins. When priorities shift, as they inevitably do, work can be accelerated, paused, or redirected without renegotiation. The brief becomes the first conversation, not the third.

“You just get straight to the good bit,” Lamplough said. “Which is the brief and the work.”

For Block, the implications run deeper than billing. The agency talks internally about the concept of Club Block – the idea that UnBlock doesn’t just change how clients pay, it changes the nature of the relationship itself.

“When the commercial tension is removed, something else becomes possible: a working partnership built on trust and strategic continuity rather than transactional negotiation. The agency can suggest a better use of resources mid-year without triggering a renegotiation. The client can redirect priorities without starting a new procurement cycle. Both parties can focus on what they came together to do,” said Braddock.

Block’s path to UnBlock was itself a progression. The agency abandoned hourly billing years ago in favour of fixed-price, value-based work – a move that changed not just how it charged but how it operated, shifting from a collection of competing individual projects to a single overarching commitment to each client.

“UnBlock is the next evolution of that thinking, extending the logic of outcome-based pricing into a continuous, flexible system built for the pace at which businesses actually move.”

The model is live with select clients, including Kitchen Warehouse.

Braddock is clear that UnBlock is not the endgame. The model will continue to evolve – that is built into its logic.

“What will not change is the underlying conviction: that flexibility is no longer optional in creative business, it is structural. UnBlock will not replace fixed-price value-based pricing or traditional retainers entirely. Different clients, different relationships, different commercial realities will always require different approaches. But it signals a shift that Block believes is permanent – toward models that move at the speed of business rather than the speed of procurement,” said Braddock.

Whether the broader industry follows is another question. Block has made no secret of the model – the mechanics have been discussed in the trade press, the logic is plain enough, and Simon Lamplough has said publicly he hopes it provides a working model for other agencies to examine. But building it required more than a good idea. It required a client willing to co-create it, a team willing to rethink their own operating system, and a willingness to accept that the old model was broken – not just inconvenient.

As Gayle While noted in the Agency of the Year citation, Block in 2025 demonstrated “how to grow without losing craft or judgement, which is not easy.”

That judgement, it turns out, started with the invoice.