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The Marketer: The Shocking Truth about the Pitch |
September 2006
By David Wethey
Could I convince you that decision-making is a higher order management skill than leadership? I am confident I could, but this isn’t that article.
Just ponder the paradox that in any good display of business books, you’ll find eight leadership titles to every one on decision-making. Odd that. Every business person needs to be able to make decisions – but how many leaders can you cope with?
Pitches are a form of selection, and selection is one of the most important aspects of the great science of decision-making. We have to make choices in all aspects of our lives – not just which agency to pick. From settling on a career to picking the wine at dinner; from where to go on holiday, to who to go on holiday with – we are constantly involved in selection, and instinctively understand the basic principles. You need to set an objective. You need criteria, and you need candidates to choose from. Giving the same brief to three or four agencies is a perfectly logical approach to finding the agency of your dreams. So where’s the problem in that?
I spent twenty years of my life pitching for new accounts, and the last eighteen running pitches for clients. Thirty eight years doesn’t make me an expert, but it does make me experienced! When I talk to agency friends they almost always say the same thing: “I would love your job. It would be fascinating to be on the other side – to watch pitches instead of having to make them!” Well, guys, it is – but not always for the reasons you might imagine. The pitch is exciting. It is theatre. It can be life and death. But is the kind of pitch we have today fair? Is it logical? Does it work well? Is it the best way for clients to find agencies? Is it something the marketing and advertising communities should be proud of? Let me take the suspense out of it by saying that I think ‘no’ is the fairest answer to all those questions. So I suppose this means that I need to start letting you into the Shocking Truth of my title – or rather the first of five.
Shocking Truth #1 is that many pitches are a terrible waste of time, money and resource. Why? When clients pick up a sledgehammer to crack a nut and devise a massive process, involving far too many agencies. And when agencies fail to calculate the odds against, and over-invest. You see, the pitch has got out of hand. It wasn’t always this way. Advertising was born in the nineteenth century, but new business as we know it only really started in 1969, which was the year that the IPA relaxed their prohibition on member agencies soliciting each other’s accounts without being invited. There were plenty of pitches in the 70’s and 80’s, but they were much less elaborate than today, and involved fewer agencies.
In the UK the average client/agency relationship lasts only three years – down from seven 30 years ago. And that average includes all the long-standing relationships, so life expectancy is much less. With shorter relationships agencies have to change their priorities and my estimate is they devote 20-25% of their total time to new business. This makes it tough to change the pitch scene. But that doesn’t make it right. Lee Clow, Creative Director of TBWA\Worldwide, wrote, “It’s very demeaning that we have to put on a show to prove that we know how to put on a show……I think our brainpower is immense, and we have to give it away on a regular basis to win a new account.”
In 1992 David Ogilvy said, “Creating speculative campaigns costs a lot of money – money which would be better spent on the agency’s current accounts. Worse they divert time of the best people in your agency to speculations”. He also, memorably, criticised asking incumbent agencies to repitch: “It’s like telling your wife that you are going to put your marriage under review – by sleeping with some other women on the off chance that one of them may turn out to be a better lover. If none of them do, you will continue to live with your wife”!
Shocking Truth #2 is that most agencies have dug their own graves. I really do not believe that what has come about is the product of client exploitation. In a classic example of over-competitive market syndrome, agencies have engaged in the indiscriminate pursuit of almost any account, to the point that many undoubtedly spend too much time on new business at the expense of old. They also seem prepared to “go all the way” all the time, against commercial sense. It is hard to find another marketplace where suppliers give their services free to other companies’ clients.
There are other ways in which agencies get it wrong. Jeff Goodby, Co-Chairman of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners wrote, “Most agencies go into a pitch and think that what will win the day is coming up with a great idea. But what it’s really about is whether they like you as people and want to hang around with you. Even if you don’t have such a powerful idea on the day of the pitch, if you can convince them you have the ability to come up with it, they’ll hire you”. Luke Sullivan, author of “Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This” gave some examples of what not to do: “Don’t be slick. Clients hate slick. Don’t present your campaign as “risk-taking” work. Clients hate that. Don’t assure clients that ‘you’re going to love this’. They won’t”.
Shocking Truth #3 is that pitches often fail to solve the client’s problem. Before embarking on a pitch, clients need to ask themselves: a) has the problem been defined? b) is the problem one that a pitch can solve? c) have the right selection criteria been applied? Nor does the pitch brief have to be a completely new campaign. I have been involved in many successful pitches where the scope was just on a project – or one aspect of a brand.
But agencies have to ask questions too. What went wrong with the prospective client’s last relationship? Are we reasonably sure that the same won’t happen to us? Do we stand a chance of beating agencies a, b & c? We might be able to come up with a pitch solution – but can we afford to commit time and money to solve their problems long term?
Shocking Truth #4 is that the whole exercise is frequently unrealistic. Why doesn’t the classic pitch make sense? Because it is based on the marriage or love affair analogy: one-to-one. Yet clients nowadays frequently have almost as many agencies to manage, as agencies have clients. So why is agency selection normally based purely on this agency’s capabilities and resources? Could we not borrow from HR and base it at least in part on synergies and teamworking?
My final Shocking Truth is that the pitch has seriously harmed day to day agency professionalism. The pitch has become a problem-solving art form – quite distinct from every day account handling. The agency’s best people are routinely working with other agencies’ clients, so new habits are formed. Time frames are telescoped, which is good for speed, but not necessarily for quality. Before pitch-mania it was acceptable not to be able to crack a problem in a fortnight. Now agencies feel they have to. Teams are smaller, which in one sense is positive. But servicing tends to suffer.
Taking the five Shocking Truths as a whole – and reflecting more widely, what makes me particularly uncomfortable about the pitch?
• When there’s too much at stake – on either side
• When there are too many agencies involved
• When there’s a lack of clarity at the client end
• When the selection criteria and scoring systems are too complicated (and I will revert to this point below when I look at the effects of procurement being heavily involved in pitches)
• When too much is asked for
• When too much is given away
• And, importantly, when the client has rushed into a pitch before giving the current agency the chance to sort things out
So what can we do about all this? Let’s go back to what clients are looking for when they call a pitch. Yes, obviously they want a new agency, new thinking and a new campaign. It might be also that that they want a better deal. But what most clients are seeking is a transformation, and the right partner to help them bring it about. Does this mean the much vaunted Big Idea? Possibly, but I’m becoming a Big Idea Cynic. The Big Idea has become an end in itself, and we all know that you can’t run an idea. It has to be activated first, which is very difficult under pitch conditions. So how big can an unactivated idea be? In any case, in a pitch the strategic basis of the idea is more important.
But I’m rushing ahead of myself. Are there more fundamental issues to address in view of the Shocking Truths? One big challenge for clients, marketing clients, is to defend the pitch from what I’m going to define as “meta-procurement”: the state of confusing a traditional strategic and creative shoot-out with specifying and procuring a nuclear power station. I have had some grim experiences recently in this regard. I am not talking negatively about the procurement division of a company being involved in a pitch either as internal consultants or joint owners of the process. With high marketing spend levels that is inevitable. Many agencies are convinced that procurement people are only interested in cost. That is not true. At procurement school they teach you a trinity of value (whether you are buying raw materials, packaging or advertising):
• how good is the quality, relative to other options?
• can we count on consistency and continuity of supply?
• what does it cost?
What concerns me deeply is the trend towards replacing pitches (for all their faults) with a tendering process. This leads us into the dark world of ‘meta-procurement’, which I define as an obsessive preoccupation with criteria and sub-criteria. And if you haven’t experienced this, how unblighted your life is. The USA has vouchsafed many benefits to us, but I do not believe the RFI (Request for Information) and RFP (Request for Proposal) are among them. The RFI is designed to smoke out potential bidders (which agencies are capable of meeting our brief?), and the RFP is an invitation to accredited bidders to respond to that brief with a detailed costed proposal. So far, so good. What seems to go wrong is when procurement people with no understanding of advertising or marketing communications, start applying rigorous criteria to ‘specifications’ in the RFI’s, and then scoring the RFI responses, without even meeting the agencies. There is a real danger of ending up with the wrong short list. Advertising is a people business. Hiring an agency should be quite like hiring staff members. The pitch is first cousin to an interview or an audition. The moment it descends into a sub-criteria shoot-out, all is lost.
Finally, you’re probably wondering what are my five top pitch tips for both clients and agencies. Starting with clients:
1. Be absolutely clear (internally and externally) about criteria, what you are looking for, and the ‘rules of the game’
2. As far as possible keep a consistent team from briefing through to the pitches
3. Have a scoring system that runs through the process, but allow enough latitude to reflect chemistry. If agency B have ‘lost out’ 87-85, but you want to work with them more – work with them
4. If you’ve got to make a decision on the evening of the last pitch, tell the agencies to get their documents/DVD’s to you before the pitches
5. Resist the temptation to spend the last fifteen minutes of the pitch meeting debating the creative recommendations
And agencies:
1. However much work you have put into a pitch, remember that, for the clients, it’s not a night out at the opera. It’s more like one commercial in a break. The objective is stand-out
2. Spend as much time as possible with the decision-makers and grab the chance of a workshop if there’s one going
3. Give them a long term vision for the brand. There’s no point in showing how the current campaign could have been done better
4. Get the ideas up early
5. Less can be more
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