In this struggling economy, there's a lot of talk recently about big advertisers changing ad spending and agencies lowering their prices. Here's why that's a bad idea.

Nobody is sure where the expression "You get what you pay for" came from, but everyone pretty much understands what it means.

The expression implies that there is a direct correlation between the price one pays for goods or services and the quality of those purchases. If you pay a high price for something, that something should be of a higher quality than if you pay a lower price for something that is the same or similar.

The activity conducted in defiance of the aforementioned axiom is "bargain hunting." A logical extension of shopping in the spirit of the belief that price and quality are commensurate is the countervailing hope that greater quality can be had for a lesser price.

Sometimes this is true. Wine is a good example of a product that can sometimes have exceptional taste for a price that seems lower than it should for such outstanding quality. Among wine professionals and oenophiles, this is known as the QPR, or Quality Price Ratio.

It is easier to peg price and quality for tangible products than it is for services. The price of services seems to be much more aligned with psychological forces than concrete elements of value. Lawyers always cost a lot because their practice is shrouded in procedural arcana, and so we believe their services SHOULD cost a lot. Advertising services, after a decade or two of downward price pressures -- and the companies within the industry caving in to those price pressures -- have a psychologically degraded status in the minds of those who retain our services.

The consolidation of media planning and buying services in the face of advertisers' quest for lower fees has commoditized the service to such an extent that the perceived value of the work done is lower than what it actually costs to perform.

Last Thursday's Wall Street Journal had an article about the suffering American auto industry. The Big Three are cutting spending and asking their agencies to cut fees. In the case of GM, they're reportedly looking to cut fees by as much as 20 percent.

A lot of people outside of the agency world servicing auto accounts don't know this, but those auto advertisers require an enormous amount of resources. In some cases, those resources extend to administrative staff that used to work for the auto manufacturer directly but are now being paid by the agency from the fees the agency collects -- and then that staff is assigned back exclusively to the auto manufacturer.

But forget for a minute that the cuts will amount to staff layoffs at the agencies working for these clients. Look instead at the message it sends to the marketplace.

The message it sends to the marketplace is that if your company is suffering, or the business you are in is not meeting with success, then you squeeze those in a position to best improve your prospects of conducting that business. When times are tough, spending less on communicating your value proposition to the marketplace -- and making it harder for those responsible for doing it -- doesn't seem to make much strategic sense. And yet, this is common when economic times are tough.

Advertising is kind of like the Marines: the first out when things go bad and the last in when prospects improve.

Companies that have a value proposition to make to the public in order to get their wares sold should NOT spend money on that endeavor. Maybe they should take advantage of the soft marketplace to get better deals for their inventory, but not buying inventory at all, or buying very little of it, and looking to pay those who create and steward that process less, is not a good strategy.

Most media planning and buying concerns are understaffed as it is. By reducing fees, advertisers leave their service providers searching for the kinds of fiduciary resources necessary to retain quality employees to work on that business and hire new people.

When a company that is among the world’s largest advertisers looks to cut fees to its service providers, all advertisers look to do the same thing. When you realize that a $20 million savings in fees is only 0.13 percent of GM's total losses for the second quarter of this year, is that savings really worth the kind of reduction in quality for the service product being purchased?

If lack of sales is the problem, shouldn't the business look to fix that by 1) improving its product, and 2) having those who help sell that product work harder not cheaper?

Sometimes, you really do get what you pay for.

Media strategies editor Jim Meskauskas is vice president and director of online media for ICON International Inc., an Omnicom company.