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Who hasn’t been involved in a ‘fixed’ pitch?

My worst experience was when pitching for the website for a world -famous central London Art Gallery. Fifteen minutes into the presentation my colleagues and I shared ‘should we bother continuing?’ glances. Being keen to get their name on the creds we persevered. Fools that we were. We found out soon after that the account went to an outfit with a personal relationship with one of the clients. Hey that’s life. Well actually it isn’t. It’s a scandalous waste of time, money, effort, ideas and goodwill.

But let’s face it, pitching is often a farce. A few years ago you could smell a stinker a mile away and give it a wide berth. But in these cash-strapped times, we find it all too easy to convince ourselves that it’s ‘worth a shot’, and we ‘won’t spend too long on it’. Oh dear.

Next thing you know you’re on a ‘short-list’ of eight agencies.

Or the client won’t disclose their marketing budget, usually for ‘commercial reasons’. Then you find out that they’ve just about got enough cash for three half-page ads in the Croydon Advertiser. In black and white.

Or my personal favourite; you never, ever, hear anything back from them. Not even a straight answer as to who is now handling the business (clue: it never moved).

All that aside, anyone know of any good pitches coming up?

Oh how much truth is in article and comment from the two Chris's!

And it does not just apply to agencies!

Suppliers all too commonly suffer the same fate, often at the hands of agencies!

I specialise in the world of door drop planning and buying services. For the last few years I have been at the head of an industry targeting revolution, which takes door drops to another level.

Some of my major competitors have been playing (or not playing) catch up for some.

Occasionally, when I have made the pitch list for some "new" business and I ask to present last, I know from the reaction of the audience that I have presented media concepts they have not seen before.

Many agencies and clients feel "safer" using a large organisation, so despite the fact that we may present the best door drop solution, we commonly don't win the pitch.

Some time later, it does not come as a surprise, to sometimes discover that "our" plan was implemented by a competitor at a cheaper rate.

It really infuriates me. But what can you do?

The invitation to pitch cannot be turned down, but over the years, you learn to present in a slightly different way, making the "client" talk to you again at some point.

As Chris Lonie says, its amazing how quiet the contact levels goes when they think they have enough information!

I am continually staggered by how many people working in the "communications" industry, have desperately poor personal communications skills.

If you have a read of the RSW 2008 New Business Report (rswagencyfinder.com/agency-new-business-research) you will see that 31% of clients ADMITTED to having a pretty good idea of who they were going to appoint before the pitch.

Why? well, I'll leave that to you to decide, but maybe it has more to do with chemistry than we may like to admit. If agency A has an average idea and Agency B has a good idea but the client likes the people at agency A more, then they will be able to work with them to get to a better idea. Agency B may have been lucky this time, may produce a crap idea next time and the client STILL doesn't like the people as much. So who would the client choose? Agency A of course.

When this happens the client may well be tempted to steer agency A in the direction of the idea proposed by agency B.

It may be infuriating, but it is only natural that it may happen.

Mmm not quite what I meant, Adam. Good chemistry is the best reason to pick an agency, I agree, but what about the ethics of quietly informing the winner of their success before the others have even presented? And don't tell me that has never happened.

The most ridiculous one I have ever heard of was when a big organisation brought in a new Marketing Director who clearly wanted to appoint his mates, but was obliged by the organisation, which had quite an ethical culture,  to go through a proper pitch process with a judging panel and clear scoring criteria.  Unfortunately for the new Marketing Director the incumbent got the highest scores and his mates got the lowest.  So he invented a second stage and asked these two agencies to pitch again.  When the incumbent won a second time he invented a third stage, with new criteria that effectively meant that only his preferred agency could win.

Indeed, Mr. Lonie, "Who HASN'T been involved in a fixed pitch?"  My most recent experience involved one of the country's biggest financial services advertisers.  Of course what made it worse was that having been given the impression that pitching was more than "worth the candle", the pitch consumed a massive amount of agency time/energy/resources = money.  All of which represented a score of other opportunities NOT pursued.  Any agency will tell you a (true!) story of a pitch that ate up more in hours, i.e., money, for all the agencies involved than the total spend attached to the client's brief.  As in so many other walks of life, an independent, experienced, progressive third party - like the AAR - can make sense of all this.  It is a shame that more clients (including some of the UK's biggest) do not follow their approach.  Unfortunately, the sanctions do not exist to encourage them to do so.  

It’s a perennial issue – and one that the IPA’s New-business Group has spent a lot of time on – but my personal view is that you can’t escape the fact that the client holds all the cards. Until the, say, 10-20 biggest agencies club together and effectively bar ‘bad’ clients from accessing their ‘top’ talent (unlikely, impractical and possible constituting a cartel), then you’ll always have clients saying ‘jump’ and an over-supplied agency market asking ‘how high’?

It’s up to agencies to look into the client’s eyes and make a call on whether a pitch is worth pursuing. This judgement will always be coloured by the prevailing conditions – the economy, existing clients looking shaky, a meagre pipeline or whatever else – but an important constant is leadership (from the CEO/MD, New-business Director or whoever else), empowering the agency to say ‘no’ when they feel they should.  

Well as we have been mentioned a couple of times it would be churlish of me not to oin the debate in some form. Obviously form our perspective we are more than aware of all the issues raised and have done our level best to eliminate as many as possible through the approach we take.

Perhaps the strongest element to that is to allow for the process to be iterative rather than rigid. This is built on two core priciples; first, that the agency community represented on any pitch we run is worthy of the word 'represents' - we want the decison to be hard for the client and the agency to give its best performance and secondly the client gets the right agency and that means ticking several boxes not just one.

Our iterative approach means that we can support agencies and clients through the process and slow down or quicken stages as required. We will counsel both sides from a neutral point of view and as we have just done on a trip to the states, will spend time briefing agencies long into the night and discuss with clients the addition of an extra meeting to drill down in a particular area requiring clarification.

I thank Chris and Simon for their kind words and in terms of advice what can I say? Choice is part of the commercial world and something we in this indusrty continue to echampion so it is only through making 'bad choices' that the winners eventually emerge. Thanks for the kind words and if I can help let me know.

Small but not insignificant compensation , is when several years later the Pitch master turns up to present his wares, not knowing that you (the 'losing'  agency man) are now the Marketing Director of a well known company and 'the shoe is now on the other foot'. It is important of course to behave impeccably, whilst the victim squirms on the end of a spike of his own making, whilst being observed quizzically by his senior colleagues. What fun! I havenlt laughed so much for years. What goes around comes around eh!