To pitch or not to pitch?

If you’ve ever worked at a creative agency, you’ll more than likely have been involved in a pitch at some stage or another. Pitches are often used when clients either want to inject new ideas into a project, shake up their incumbent agency or as a way of determining the skills of potential creative partners. The most controversial part of this practice is that pitches are more often than not, unpaid. Think about that for a moment… how many service professions do you know, where you’d ask for a free sample before deciding on whether to pay? No doctor, solicitor or even plumber would agree to such an outlandish request. Yet it is an everyday occurrence in the creative industries.

Free pitching has long been a bug bear of creative agencies throughout the world. For larger agencies who can afford it, free pitches are part and parcel of working with new clients. For smaller agencies free pitches can often be a a matter of life or death, with failure to secure the win literally putting their very existence in jeopardy.

When I worked at a well-known agency in New York, pitching was such a major part of our approach, we had a designated ‘pitch team. This team literally went from pitch project to pitch project. In fact we got so good at it that our pitch win rate was well over 80%. Unfortunately, this meant that clients often got short changed as a result. The ‘pitch team’ would be rolled out to secure the win, while an entirely new team would take over to deliver it. This is a common practice still employed by many agencies today.

THE PROBLEM WITH FREE PITCHING

Many people see free pitching as a toxic practice that’s simply become an accepted part of the new business process. You could liken it to going to a restaurant, trying the most expensive dishes and only paying for the ones you liked the taste of. When you view in this way, the idea of giving your professional services away for free feels ludicrous.

We believe that free pitching doesn’t really works in anybody’s favour, not client nor agency, and there are several reasons for this:

1. It devalues the creative process and work 
   Providing creative work for free, in a reduced time frame, with a minimal briefing and no time for research or collaboration with the client, creates a skewed impression of what it takes to produce great work. It massively undervalues the creative process and the creative output simultaneously.

2. Pitches can be risky business 
   Ownership of the creative work from a pitch is a very grey area. Clients often feel entitled to utilise pitch ideas and could even ask another agency or their own in-house team to execute them.

3. Free pitching costs money and resources 
   During a free pitch you’re being asked to invest time, money and resources into something that will likely be discarded. They take time and attention away from paying clients. The process also encourages creatives to just ‘make cool stuff’ rather than strategising to solve real the challenges clients face.

4. They’re an ineffective method of judging an agency’s capabilities
   As fun as free pitches are for creatives to suspend disbelief and think ‘out of the box’, using them as a method of evaluating an agency’s skills is useless and often misleading.

A ‘NO PITCH’ POLICY

While boycotting free pitches and telling clients ‘NO’ may be good in theory, in practice it’s far more challenging. If you’re an established agency with a solid reputation and new business pipeline, it’s far easier to say no. However, if you’re a smaller agency, a startup, or simply a freelancer who needs the business (and let’s face it, money), then maintaining a hard line is much more difficult. The dilemma remains – do you continue to perpetuate the problem, or say no and miss out on the potential revenue? It’s a Catch-22 that Joseph Heller would have been proud of!

Most creative agencies will tell you that the best work they produce is always after they’ve formed a good working relationship with a client. They’ve invested time in getting to know the client. They’ve formulated creative strategies based on meticulous analysis of their market and the challenges they face. This approach allows agencies to be more in tune with what clients are looking for. It sets the right level of expectation, but above all else, it establishes a mutual respect for one another, and the time it takes to produce outstanding work.

A RESPONSE TO COVID-19

Often, during times of uncertainty, the creative industries are some of the first businesses to feel the pinch. Covid-19 has been no exception to this trend. Its impact on creative industries has already been dramatic. While the long-term effects aren’t entirely clear yet, we’ve noticed some short-term trends emerging:

1. Reduction in agency sizes
   Large agencies will be forced to reduce staff numbers. Worst still, many will have to close their doors entirely.

2. Rise of the smaller agencies
   We predict a glut of smaller agencies will emerge to compete with the larger more established players in the market This will massively increase competition but also force partnerships and opportunities to collaborate.

3. Freelance boom
   With more and more people being made redundant or deciding to jump ship, the creative market will become saturated with freelancers looking for work. This wealth of experience and expertise for hire will help smaller players to compete with larger agencies in ways they previously couldn’t.

4. The demand for pitches with increase
   We’ve already witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of agencies being asked to re-tender or pitch for work. As clients re-evaluate their priorities and long-term plans, this is only likely to increase. In turn, this will have a knock-on effect with regard to budgets, client projects and timelines for delivery, all of which will be condensed. If you’ve not yet experienced this, the likelihood is, you soon will.

Whilst some of these trends are inevitable, it is how the industry responds that will be most interesting. With any major change comes opportunity to set new precedents for working conditions and expectations.

As long as there are clients asking for free pitches and agencies prepared to do so, free pitching will almost certainly remain part of the ‘norm’. However, as an industry have a responsibility to help change this. We need to educate our clients about why it’s a bad business practice and how it devalues both them and us.

Where do you stand? Will you pitch or take the current situation as an opportunity to finally say’NO?’