Knowledge Centre – The Blog

Unlike a blog, this is not a collection of musings or things that caught our attention today. Instead, it is a collection of the important insights, trends and issues we have encountered in our work with our clients and the solutions we have developed. This is why we call it our Knowledge Centre. It is where we share the collective knowledge of TrinityP3. We add to this regularly. We update it when and where needed. We recommend bookmarking this page and be sure to visit regularly when looking for inspiration, insight and knowledge on the world of marketing management.

How do you pitch when you’re the incumbent agency?

It sounds like the toughest gig in town. Your client has called a review of your agency – despite your best efforts – and you’ve been asked if you want to take part. You’re angry, scared and pumped in equal ...
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Agency Search: the chemistry process and ten key questions to ask

TrinityP3 UK is a founder signatory of the Pitch Positive Pledge launched jointly by the IPA and ISBA in May 2022. We are strong supporters of the Pledge’s objective to reduce the negative effects of the traditional pitch process on ...
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Reaching Across the Aisles: The Biggest Challenges Between Procurement and Marketing, and How to Address Them

The concept of procurement and marketing teams working together in pitching or renegotiation of agency services carries, in my experience, a veneer of PC speak that often obscures the truth. Some common examples I generally hear repeated at the start ...
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The Chemistry Conundrum: Learning Enough About Your Agencies to Make Meaningful Decisions

I’ve always found the term ‘Chemistry Session’ to be a complete misnomer. I use the term because it’s entered into pitching vernacular. And because the concept of ‘human chemistry’ exists. And because I can’t think of anything better myself that’s ...
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Growing Wings on Your Unicorn – Making Agency Credentials Compelling

Credentials – either written long-form, delivered in ‘chemistry sessions’ or both. They’re often maligned, just as often misunderstood by both agencies and their potential clients, running a pitch. We do a lot of work with pitches, and increasingly, a lot ...
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The Final Scores – The Essentials of Agency Pitch Scorecards

In agency pitching, proper evaluation is important. The services you’re procuring are complex. Not everything you’re buying directly quantifiable as units – in fact, much of it is not at all quantifiable. There are multiple candidates to keep track of ...
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Why marketers will continue to use a pitch to select agencies

The headlines scream “The pitch is broken”. But in fact, the pitch is alive and well and has never been more popular. And that is perhaps the real problem here. If we define the pitch process as ‘to assess, competitively, ...
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Tails wagging dogs: when process eats away at culture

Peter Drucker tells us ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’. In our experience, that’s a near hard-and-fast organisational rule.. But when we assess the current state of any marketing organisation, which is the first stage of most of our engagements, we ...
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Agency Client Chemistry Meetings – the Seven Deadly Sins to avoid and seven deadly words you never want to hear at them

TrinityP3 UK is a founder signatory of the Pitch Positive Pledge launched jointly by the IPA and ISBA in May 2022. We are strong supporters of the Pledge’s objective to reduce the negative effects of the traditional pitch process on ...
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When is an agency pitch, not an agency pitch?

Advertising is one of the most visible communication professions. And language is an important component of communication. Yet, as an industry, the liberal application of language communicates all kinds of misconceptions. Now, before you accuse me of being a language ...
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The limitations of input cost over output and outcome value for advertising agencies

Talking with a media agency today, they were sharing the struggle they had with a client getting a fair fee. They won a pitch based on their excellent credentials in creating econometric models for their clients to inform media mix ...
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A Marketing Recession Playbook: The Operations Edit

Mark Ritson’s recently published ‘Recession Playbook’  was a typically no-nonsense ‘don’t lose your collective heads’ message to marketers and their organisational overlords. A summation of Ritson’s message is ‘rely on advertising and marketing theory and past experience; resist the urge ...
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What does financial and rate benchmarking mean at TrinityP3?

Benchmark. It’s a term we use a lot at TrinityP3, and the concept underpins much of the work we do and the recommendations we report to our clients. But it’s also a term – the word and its application – ...
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Unintended messages in client-agency relationships

With his third law, Isaac Newton told us that ‘for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction’. Much later, Edward A Murphy famously observed that ‘if there are two or more ways to do something and one of ...
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5 steps to overcome internal marketing team non-alignment

One of the greatest challenges in marketing today is how to align internal teams, approaches, and performance measures. The complexity of channels, the ongoing digitisation of society in a Covid-impacted world, global uncertainty impacting business confidence, and the need to ...
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Do you need to review your incumbent agency? If so – don’t launch a pitch

Do you know what I love? I love being able to recommend to a client that a pitch is not the answer. It may sound strange, coming from an organisation for whom running pitches is a part of the service ...
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Why agency pitches should be a test drive and not a beauty parade

The industry trade media regularly carry stories about the significant problems posed by the pitch process. These stories refer to the pitch as if there is only one-way marketers select agencies. But in our own experience, there are many ways ...
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Production houses are tweaking their T&Cs to get rich

Because of some sharp-eyed clients, we have noticed that a few production houses are making changes to their terms and conditions that will create a legal mess for agencies and their clients while increasing the opportunity for these production houses ...
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For an ideas industry, most agencies are very poor at protecting their intellectual property

Advertising is an industry of ideas. And while it is true, as recently written here in Campaign, that you cannot copyright an idea, you can own the copyright in an expression of an idea when it is permanently recorded. Well, in ...
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Agency Selection and the Paradox of Choice – Why Fewer Agencies is Never Too Few

During my recent sojourn back in agency land, I was heavily involved in pitches. I declined the agency’s involvement in one of these pitches, for reasons not relevant to this article. It turned into an accidentally wise decision; I later ...
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A conversation on aligning procurement and marketing in a conscious climate

Suits & Sneakers TV is hosted by the founder, Anne Miles. It is their online channel, where you can hear from the best of the best in marketing, advertising and media. Here, Anne challenges convention by looking at conscious marketing ...
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What must marketing provide for agencies to make sound business decisions on pitching?

The recent demands of marketers have been for agencies to be more transparent, particularly in their media dealing on behalf of their clients. ISBA and the ANA were vocal in their demands for greater transparency. But it will be interesting ...
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Brain-Rape in the Boardroom 2 – Agency Pitches and Creative IP

Part 2 – The Advertiser Recently, I wrote an article about ‘brain-rape’. It was sparked by some posts we read about advertisers stealing the pitch ideas from losing agencies. Part 1 of this article focused on the agency perspective and ...
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Brain-Rape in the Boardroom 1 – Agency Pitches and Creative IP

Part 1: The Agencies Brain-rape. Anyone would think I had used this term with clickbait in mind, right? Well, it does make a good, attention-grabbing title, for sure. But I’m not using it egregiously. It’s a term used recently in ...
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‘Is pitching broken?’ is the wrong question

Pitching is currently flawed, and it doesn't appear to be improving. The industry should focus on avoiding beauty parades and crude cost-cutting measures to find a more sustainable approach. The industry question 'Is the pitch process broken?' is not the right question ...
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How to make marketing change management more successful

There has been an incredible amount of change within marketing departments (and of course businesses overall) over the past 2 years. Some teams that we talk with feel burnt out, others are refreshed with new models and ways of working, ...
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Your next agency pitch will cost you financially, but not as much as you think.

The practice of going to tender at the end of the agency contract period has become a habit for many major brands. Procurement will argue it is the only way to truly test an agency against the market. But as ...
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Is your agency a precision weapon, or a passive order-taker?

Across the last 12 months, I’ve noticed a distinct upswing in a certain type of project undertaken by TrinityP3. It’s the type of project I’d call a ‘pivot project’. I give it this name not because a ‘pivot’ of some ...
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What can save agencies from a reduced share of their client’s production spend?

Yet another agency account director was complaining that they had lost a large chunk of agency revenue to a production competitor on price. One of these specialist production suppliers provides a low level of creativity and a focused production line ...
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Where is it written that marketers must write better briefs?

Writing a briefing is so central to the advertising process, you’d think even a marketer could do it. But apparently not. According to the Better Briefs Project, which commissioned a global industry survey, it seems this is not the case ...
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