Life's a pitch . . . and then you don't even get the contract

Sunday Herald, The, Jul 10, 2005 by Steven Vass

BETWEEN the flip charts and warm handshakes, all is not well in the world of new business pitches. From advertising to public relations, from design to contract publishing, agencies are tired of jumping through hoops for marketing directors.

The creative pitch is the standard process through which the marketing department of an organisation chooses agencies to handle its creative accounts.

The general practice is to invite applications and whittle them down to a shortlist.

The selected applicants are then given a brief and asked to come in and present designs and strategic ideas to show what they would do if they won the account. From here, the agency chooses a winner.

But scratch the surface and you find many agencies questioning whether this process is always necessary.

"We find that clients get better work out of their agency if they appoint on the basis of chemistry, track record and an understanding of their business, " says Mark Stephenson, co-head of Glasgow design agency Stand.

"Pitches are an unnatural environment because any relationship with the client is about collaboration and trust."

Beyond this, there is also a long list of gripes about bad practice. Andy Crummey, a managing partner at Agency Assessments, which advises marketers on how to conduct pitches, says Scottish marketers are, if anything, more at fault than those south of the border.

"The large majority of Scottish-based clients could do themselves considerable favours by rethinking their approach to the pitch process, " he says.

A chief complaint is that there are often too many agencies involved. As Ian McAteer, managing director of Edinburgh ad agency The Union, puts it: "Frankly, if you are going out to 10 agencies, it shows that you don't know what you are doing.

"The average pitch can easily cost an agency between pounds- 20,000 and pounds-30,000 in outlay and hours. If you have 10 agencies, that's pounds-270,000 of economic wastage that a client is responsible for."

Other issues include being given too little time to prepare;

complex briefs; not getting paid to compensate the creative work involved; and new marketing directors immediately reviewing an account.

This is before you even get to one-to-one behaviour. While nobody is suggesting it is the norm, most Scottish agency bosses have plenty to say about client rudeness.

As Crummey says: "I hear horror stories about marketing directors sitting po-faced throughout a pitch, or ringing a bell to say that time's up.

"There are certain, very macho clients who will ask an agency what fee they expect and then halve it."

Particularly notorious are clients at the high-volume end of retail, who tend to see advertising as an expense rather than a way of building a brand.

Surprisingly perhaps, there exists a set of guidelines for industry practice which is sponsored by both the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) and various client-side associations.

Notable inclusions are that the client shouldn't change agencies if a problem could be resolved; there should never be more than four agencies on a shortlist; agencies should be given four to six weeks to prepare a pitch; and they should receive a small payment towards the work involved.

Asked why these guidelines are routinely ignored, agencies say it's hard to present a united front and walk away from bad pitches when you know anyone with a laptop can set themselves up as a marketing consultant and undercut you.

An additional problem is that the marketers don't entirely agree with agencies about what is fair.

Derek Scott, marketing manager for Jim Beam brands like Aftershock and Sours, says that on the one hand he would never have more than two agencies on his shortlist, but he thinks you can't choose an agency purely on track record.

He also has no truck with compensating pitch efforts. He says: "My heart bleeds. At the end of the day, we are all in commerce. I don't cry if Wetherspoon doesn't stock my product - I get on with it."

Alan McIntyre, network marketing director for Scottish Enterprise, has similarly mixed feelings. SE is on the verge of announcing its roster of preferred agencies for 17 threeyear marketing services contracts for everything from design to events management.

With different numbers of agencies on the roster for each contract, there will be dozens of winners. McIntyre argues that while he generally supports the four-agency maximum for shortlists, it is impractical for a body like SE because there is so much work to be done.

Nevertheless, he will be glad to see the back of SE's old practice of holding pitches for all pieces of work worth more than pounds-10,000. "I felt we were too often asking people to pitch for small pieces of business. It was inefficient, " he says.

In sum, there is still plenty of clear blue water between marketers and their agencies.

With the IPA's cross-sector study into the Scottish marketing industry due to report next month, many sense an opportunity to bring these issues to the fore. It will be interesting to see whether they win any arguments in the weeks ahead.