The trigger to return to the topic was reading Avi Dan’s article in Forbes The Pitch Is The Worst Business Practice For Marketers And Agencies where it counts, and I agree, that the pitch It is an artificial and random process that does not resemble the real (and necessary) interaction that occurs between the client and the agency.
It is true that the pitches They can represent an advantage for independent agencies or for those that do not belong to large groups because it gives them the opportunity to present themselves and show their talent. But as Dan explains, today the pitch It’s a waste of time. In fact, he says, 99.9% of the proposals that arise within the framework of a pitch are not implemented. And add another key piece of information, the cost of a pitch can represent up to 30-40% of an agency’s overall running costs and this makes them basically unsustainable because they consume hours, resources and brain cells of a creative team under pressure from the deadline. Not to mention that it became a contest in which the best idea does not always win and on more than one occasion it ends up being defined by the economic proposal.
I must admit that there was a time when, with my agencyI wanted to participate in all pitch to those who summoned me and we gave everything. I remember once we were in the middle of one of these processes when I read a post on LinkedIn of Marian Ventura of the triple impact agency Done!where she said that she had been summoned to participate in a pitch and stated that his agency charged for ideas so if they paid him for his participation, he would gladly do so. At that time I made a click, I thought who gives me back the time invested, the ideas, etc., of course it is a gamble but at what cost? That was the first sign of discomfort at being part of that practice. But I admit it… I continued to participate in many more.
Between the pastiche of ideas and the pitch trap
To the already harmful practice of pitch two edges are added. The first is the pastiche of ideas that occurs when the client, after the instance of pitchhires an agency for the budget it manages, but to implement the strategy and ideas of another that was left out without taking into account that each one has its own style when it comes to proposing a proposal.
The second is about the pitch trap What happens when brands or companies call agencies with the sole objective of reconfirming or pressuring the current one so that its place feels threatened and it “moves” more and better. This happened to me. I participated in a pitch where without feedback some and through a note in the media, I found out that the agency that the brand already had and to which, during the pitch, had questioned about their lack of commitment and that is why they felt it was time to change, “because the link was worn out.” Luckily we didn’t stay!
Pitch or not pitch is that the question?
Again I quote Marian Ventura from Done!, which says that companies that do not want to pay for ideas “project distrust”. And that is the key point.
The pitch necessary, what is no longer viable is to dirty the industry with bad practices because that undermines the work of all the agencies. As another colleague pointed out, Gigí Gutiérrez from Planta agency“Unpaid pitch is precarious work.”
That is where the problem lies, as Dan says, because the pitch force us to work in isolation, but innovative and effective work is born precisely from collaboration and trust that is built in the long term and that is something that a pitch can never show.