Jerry Della Femina famously said about his chosen career, “I honestly believe that advertising is the most fun you can have with your clothes on”.
He is a man who knows a thing or two about advertising, and his career was a hugely successful one that thrived on controversy and humour. So – we should listen to him and ask ourselves two questions – why the pitch process has developed to squeeze out all the fun, and what we should do about it.
How did we get here?
Let’s dig into this a little. Pitching today would rarely be described as fun. Instead, it’s seen as a high-stakes activity, exhausting, and time-consuming. These factors combine to make a subliminal case that it should also be deadly serious – it almost seems that enjoying a pitch might devalue the result.
This wasn’t always the case. Many of us with longer agency careers can remember the excitement of our first pitch. It was an opportunity to showcase what the agency could do and demonstrate our energy, engagement, and cultural fit. On the client side, pitching used to be an exciting activity where you could see a breadth of agencies and go in looking for the right fit for you and your team. It was something to look forward to, as long as you didn’t do it too often. For both teams, the fun of the pitch set the tone for the relationship with the winning agency.
Yet, increasingly in the UK and elsewhere, this element of fun has been lost. The pitch has become a compliance exercise, with players on both sides simply going through the motions, and no one is having much fun.
This loss of fun is a serious problem because it detracts from the very essence of what a pitch should be: the beginning of a great partnership. The way an agency behaves in a pitch tells you a lot about how they’ll behave when the pressure is on. Likewise, how a client conducts a pitch tells an agency what it’s like to work with them. If the process is dry, rigid, and joyless, what kind of message—let alone precedent—does that send?
Fun is intrinsic to chemistry and creative thinking.
When I say “fun,” I don’t mean silly or frivolous. I mean a process that is stimulating, energising, and inspiring. It’s about bringing the human element to the forefront, moving beyond a 47-slide PowerPoint presentation (and let’s be honest, it’s pretty likely that ChatGPT will have written that anyway). The goal is to create an experience that makes people want to get involved and engage with the process, rather than slog through it. This is crucial for sparking creativity rather than draining it. Fun is also intrinsic to chemistry, and you seldom have fun with someone you have no chemistry with.
As a pitch consultant, I’m often asked to schedule chemistry sessions to draw out how the agency and client will work together. Time and again, the best sessions I have seen are the ones where people come with a mindset of having fun. This is where the most successful partnerships are forged. They don’t emerge from perfect PowerPoint decks but from shared curiosity, ambition and collaboration. This kind of connection is impossible when everyone is watching the clock, buried in notes for a rehearsed Q&A, or focused on answering one hundred questions. A fun, stimulating pitch process is the source of creative thinking and insight because it allows for genuine interaction and sparks new ideas in a relaxed, collaborative environment.
A BetterPitch – bringing the fun back to pitching
So, how do we restore the element of fun into pitching?
First, let’s be clear: a good pitch process, such as TrinityP3’s BetterPitch, does not let a purely procurement mindset take the lead and make it a compliance or box-ticking exercise. If that’s a necessary part of the process, schedule it separately and at an appropriate stage of the work. Instead, recognize that fun happens when you design the pitch process to bring it out. This can be achieved through collaborative workshops, meaningful conversations, and creating space to think and explore together.
Here are some actionable solutions which TrinityP3 uses through BetterPitch to create opportunities for clients and agencies to test how well they work together:
- Workshops: Design a session that looks and feels like a workshop. This makes it feel more like a problem-solving session than an exam. By working together on a real-world problem, both sides can see how they collaborate and whether their working styles are a good fit.
- Hackathons: Bring an unexpected “outside the box” dilemma to the room and give everyone permission to think laterally. This kind of challenge can be a great way to see how an agency thinks and operates under pressure, revealing their true creative talent and process rather than just what they’ve done for a credentials presentation.
- Sprints: Consider a short, focused sprint where the client and agency team work on a specific challenge. This compressed timeframe forces quick collaboration and reveals a lot about the chemistry and problem-solving skills of both parties. A sprint is less about the final polished product and more about the journey of getting there.
Fun also happens when the session looks like a hot-topic discussion that sparks unexpected thinking. This allows for a more dynamic and genuine conversation, revealing a team’s true intelligence and curiosity.
It’s one of our “Five F’s”, the principles behind the platform of Fast, Fit, Focus, Fair and Fun.
We promise to bring all of these to every pitch we run, to achieve a better result for everyone involved.
You can read more about the BetterPitch framework here or contact us here about how we can help make your pitch a BetterPitch.
