What to Include in a Vertical Drama Commissioning RFP

What to Include in a Vertical Drama Commissioning RFP So You Get Comparable Bids

Three bids on the same series. One quotes 70 episodes at a single fixed price. One quotes per finished minute. One quotes a monthly retainer with an episode allowance layered on top. Nothing in the three documents lines up, so the commissioning team spends the following two weeks sending clarification emails and building a normalisation sheet nobody trusts. That is not a supplier problem. That is a brief problem, and it is created at the moment the request goes out.

A commissioning request for a vertical drama series is a specification document, not an invitation. It decides what comes back. When the request leaves the scope, the technical standard, the quality bar and the commercial shape open to interpretation, every responding studio interprets them differently and correctly. The bids that arrive are all defensible and none of them are comparable. The fix is structural. Write the request in blocks that force the same answer shape from every respondent, and score the responses against the blocks rather than against each other.

1. Why Three Bids Come Back Incomparable

The vertical drama format is young enough that no standard commercial unit has settled. Some studios price by episode. Some price by finished minute. Some price by production week. Some price by shot count, which is the only unit that tracks the actual cost driver in an AI native pipeline. All four are legitimate internal models, and none of them converts cleanly into another without knowing the assumptions underneath.

Format volume compounds the problem. A 70 episode series at 90 seconds per episode is a different object from a 90 episode series at 60 seconds, and both get called a series in a request. The global market has grown fast enough that supply has outpaced any shared vocabulary, a point the trade coverage makes repeatedly, including Definition magazine on the rise of vertical dramas and the Omdia revenue figures it cites. Fast growth rewards speed of supply, not standardisation of paperwork.

So the request has to supply the vocabulary itself. Every block below exists to remove one degree of interpretive freedom. The goal is not to constrain how a studio produces. The goal is to constrain how a studio answers, so that the differences you see in the bids are real differences in capability and price rather than differences in accounting.

2. The Scope Block: What You Are Actually Buying

State the deliverable in countable units and state them once. Episode count, target runtime per episode with an acceptable range, total finished runtime, language of primary production, and the number of localised versions included. If localisation is optional, mark it optional and require it priced separately rather than folded in. A bid that folds an optional item into a headline number is not wrong, it is just no longer comparable to a bid that did not.

Say explicitly what is inside the scope and what is outside it. Script development, casting or character design, generation, editorial, sound design, music, colour, subtitling, thumbnail and key art, trailer cutdowns, platform specific masters. Each of these is a real line of work that some studios include by default and others treat as an add on. The most common source of a surprise invoice on a first commission is key art and trailer material that nobody named in the request.

Include the source material state. Original concept, adapted from an owned title, adapted from a licensed title, or supplied script. A studio quoting against a finished 70 episode script package is quoting a different job from one quoting against a two page premise. If the material is partial, say what exists and what does not, and require the respondent to price the gap as a named line.

3. The Specification Block: Format and Technical Standards

Technical specification is where cheap comparability is won. Frame size and aspect ratio, frame rate, colour space, delivery codec and container, loudness target, dialogue to effects headroom, subtitle format, file naming convention, and the metadata schema the platform ingest expects. Publish the actual ingest specification if you have one. If you do not, name the platform standard you intend to deliver against.

Vertical drama is watched on phone speakers in noisy rooms, so the audio specification carries more weight here than it would on a horizontal commission. A loudness target alone is not enough. State the dialogue intelligibility standard you expect and the playback condition you will judge it in. Studios that have actually delivered into these platforms will recognise the requirement immediately. Studios that have not will price the mix as an afterthought, and you will see that in the response.

Add the shot level technical expectations if the production is AI native. Character consistency tolerance across episodes, acceptable artefact classes, how many generation passes are assumed per approved shot, and whether upscaling is included. These are not creative questions. They are cost drivers, and leaving them unstated is what lets two bids differ by a factor of two while both look reasonable.

4. The Quality Block: How the Delivery Will Be Judged

Define acceptance before you define price. Every respondent should know the exact conditions under which you will reject an episode, how many rejection rounds are included, and what the turnaround on a fix is. A bid priced against unlimited revisions and a bid priced against two revision rounds are not the same bid, and the second one is usually the honest one.

Name the review structure. Who reviews, at what stage, against what checklist, and how many people have veto authority. A commissioning team with four internal stakeholders and no named decision maker will burn a production schedule regardless of which studio wins. Putting the review structure in the request forces you to fix it before it becomes a delivery problem, and it signals to respondents that the process on your side is real.

One more line belongs in the quality block, and it is the one most requests omit. State how the first two episodes will be treated. A staged acceptance, where episodes one and two are reviewed and signed off before the remaining volume enters production, protects both sides on a first commission. It gives the studio a calibration point and gives you an exit that costs a fraction of the full series. Respondents who price this staging cleanly are showing you they have run a production that needed it.

Set the quality tier explicitly rather than implying it with adjectives. A premium tier and a volume tier are different products with different price floors, and a request that asks for premium quality at a volume budget will attract responses that quietly optimise one of the two. Say which tier this commission is, and say what evidence you expect a respondent to submit as proof they operate at that tier. Reference material from prior work carries more information than any written claim.

5. The Commercial Block: Ask for Structure, Not a Number

Require every respondent to break the price into the same components. Pre production and development, generation or principal production, post, audio, localisation, project management, and contingency. A single number tells you what a studio will charge. A structured number tells you where the studio believes the work actually is, which is the more useful signal when you are deciding who to trust with 70 episodes.

Specify the payment structure you will accept, or at minimum the shape. Milestone based against named deliverables, with the final milestone tied to acceptance rather than delivery, is the standard that protects both sides. Ask for the respondent's proposed milestone schedule as part of the bid. A studio that proposes six sensible milestones tied to real artefacts is telling you it has run a production of this size before.

Require the price to hold for a stated period and require the assumptions behind it to be listed. Assumption lists are the most underrated part of any bid. When a studio writes that its price assumes a locked script by a given date, a single approving stakeholder and no more than two revision rounds per episode, you have learned exactly where the commercial risk sits and what will trigger a change order.

6. The Governance Block: Reporting, Escalation and Change Control

State what reporting you expect and at what frequency. Episode level status, shot level completion against plan, open issues with owners, and a rolling delivery forecast. Weekly is the workable cadence for a series of this length. Daily reporting on a 70 episode production creates noise and costs money that would be better spent on the work.

Define the escalation path in the request. Name the roles on both sides, the response window for each severity level, and the point at which an issue becomes a commercial conversation rather than a production one. Most first commissions fail slowly rather than suddenly. An issue surfaces in week three, gets absorbed by a producer trying to be helpful, and arrives at the commissioning team in week nine as a delivery slip.

Change control deserves its own paragraph in the request rather than a clause buried in the contract. State how a change is requested, who prices it, how long the pricing takes, and whether work continues while a change is being priced. This single block prevents the most common commercial dispute on AI native commissions, which is a disagreement about whether a creative note was a note or a new scope.

7. The Rights Block: Ownership, Reuse and Archive

Say what you are buying in rights terms and say it in the request rather than at contract stage. Ownership of the finished episodes, ownership of the underlying assets, territory, term, exclusivity, and whether the studio may reference the work publicly. A studio pricing a full buyout with no reference rights is pricing a different job from one that keeps portfolio rights, and the difference is real money.

AI native production adds an asset layer that horizontal commissions do not have. Character models and reference sets, prompt and parameter records, style definitions, trained assets where they exist, and the project file structure. Decide whether these transfer to you, remain with the studio, or sit under a licence. If you intend to commission a sequel or a spin off later, the asset layer is the thing that makes that cheap or expensive, and it is almost always cheaper to secure it now.

Require an archive deliverable as a named line item. What is stored, in what structure, in what format, and for how long. An archive that exists only as a shared drive folder with inconsistent naming is not an archive. Ask for the naming convention as part of the bid response, because it is a fast and honest read on how the studio actually operates day to day.

8. How to Score the Responses Without a Spreadsheet Argument

Publish the scoring weights in the request itself. Capability evidence, technical compliance, commercial structure, governance and rights terms, with a stated weight on each. Respondents will write to the weights, which is the point. You want the strongest studios spending their effort on the dimensions you actually care about rather than on presentation.

Score each block independently before anyone sees the total price. Price awareness contaminates capability judgement in a predictable direction, and on a first commission the expensive mistake is almost never overpaying by fifteen percent. It is selecting a partner that cannot hold character consistency across 70 episodes and discovering it at episode 30.

Then run one clarification round, not three. A single structured round, with the same questions sent to every respondent and the answers returned in writing, keeps the process defensible and short. If a respondent's answers move their price materially, that tells you their original bid was built on assumptions they had not tested. That is worth knowing before signature rather than after.

Keep a written record of why the winning bid won, in the terms of the blocks. Six months into the production, when a change order is being argued, the record of what you weighted and what the studio committed to is the fastest route back to a shared version of events. It also improves the next request. Commissioning gets better through iteration on the document, not through instinct, and the studios worth working with will recognise a request that has been through that iteration.

Axis AI Studios Perspective

The request document is the first real piece of production management on a commission, and it is usually the piece nobody owns. Commissioning teams are staffed for content judgement, not for procurement specification, so the request goes out light and the comparison work lands later in a worse form. Axis AI Studios treats specification as production work rather than paperwork, because the shape of the request determines how much management the commission needs afterwards.

Our position is that a well specified commission reduces the number of decisions a platform has to make during production, and that this is where the real cost sits. Every unspecified item becomes a mid production conversation, and every mid production conversation costs schedule. Vertical drama runs on volume, and volume punishes ambiguity harder than any other format because the same ambiguity repeats across 70 episodes rather than across four.

Axis AI Studios is an AI native vertical drama production studio based in the Netherlands, working with platforms, media companies and IP holders on original series production. If you are preparing a commissioning request and want the specification blocks pressure tested before it goes out to bid, write to business@axisaistudios.com.

FAQ

How long should a vertical drama commissioning RFP be?
Long enough to remove interpretation and no longer. Most workable requests run between six and twelve pages, with the technical specification as an appendix. Length is not the quality signal. Whether every block above has a stated answer is the quality signal.

Should the RFP include a budget range?
Yes, as a range and a tier rather than a target number. Withholding budget produces bids anchored on what respondents guess you can afford, which is the opposite of comparability. Stating a range and a quality tier lets respondents tell you honestly what fits inside it and what does not.

How many studios should be invited to bid?
Three to five for a first commission. Fewer than three gives you no comparison. More than five creates a clarification and scoring load that slows the decision without improving it, particularly when the studios in the format are still relatively few.

Further Reading

For the full list of documents and decisions to have in hand before you sign, the vertical drama commission checklist covers everything a business needs before a production agreement is executed.

For the evaluation work that runs alongside the bid comparison, the due diligence checklist for AI vertical drama production partners covers what to verify about a studio beyond what appears in its response.

For turning a selected partner into a series that matches what you had in mind, the guide to briefing an AI native production partner covers the document structure that closes the gap between intent and delivery.