Managing Marketing: How Marketers And Procurement Can Deliver A Better Pitch

Jeremy Taylor, Managing Director, and Mark Smith, Business Director of TrinityP3 UK, discuss the complexities and challenges of the pitch process in the advertising industry, exploring the notion that while many believe the pitch process is broken, it may simply need to evolve better to suit the modern landscape of marketing and media. 

The conversation explores the significance of chemistry in client-agency relationships, the role of procurement, and the necessity for a more streamlined and engaging pitch process. Mark and Jeremy introduce the concept of a ‘BetterPitch‘ that emphasises fun, focus, and flexibility, aiming to foster better relationships and outcomes in the advertising world.

As an industry, we need to move away from the question that is so often asked: “What should we do instead of pitching?” Instead, the questions we should be asking are: “What is the most appropriate way to pitch?” and “How can we make the pitching process better?”.

You can listen to the podcast here:

I think we’ll probably spend a bit of time talking about that word broken.

Transcription:

Darren:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests, each week.

For years, the advertising industry has circled the same conversation, like a song on repeat. The pitch process is broken, the pitch process is broken. Complaints about the bloated process, the speculative work, the cost of it financially, or simply the emotional toll, everyone agrees something must change, yet nothing happens. But what if the industry’s been asking the wrong questions? The fact is pitching isn’t going away. Clients will always need to review their agency relationships.

As it does, for every service industry, the pitch still plays a vital role in agency selection and in establishing a healthy and productive client agency relationship. But the issue is that while marketing has evolved rapidly in recent years, pitching has not.

As an industry, we need to move away from the question that is so often asked: what should we do instead of pitching? Rather, the question we should be asking is, what is the most appropriate way to pitch? And how can we make the pitch process better?

To discuss this topic and explore the concepts of a better pitch, please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, the managing director of TrinityP3 UK, Jeremy Taylor. Welcome, Jeremy.

Jeremy:

Thank you, Darren. Great to be here.

Darren:

And the mastermind behind The Better Pitch, Mark Smith. Hi, Mark.

Mark:

Hi, Darren. Thanks for having me.

Darren:

Look, thanks for making the time to have this conversation, because I think it’s an interesting one. It’s been quite a while that we’ve been listening to particularly the industry, the agencies and the trade media carry on about the pitch is broken.

I’m surprised they haven’t declared it dead because most things in advertising seem to be dying, but the general thrust is that the pitch is broken. Isn’t that right, Mark?

Mark:

Well, okay, so there’s the question, isn’t it? I think we’ll probably spend a bit of time talking about that word broken. For me, really, a lot of this goes back to a conversation I had with an ex-colleague of mine, and he was moaning about a process that he’d been on. It was months and months and months, I think in the end, it was probably close to a year.

And I’d stepped away from the agency world for a little while, and it just reminded me of the issues that kind of kept coming up when we were pitching. And I just thought to myself, “There has to be a better way to doing this.” It wasn’t that it was necessarily broken, although that is what everybody says. That seems to be maybe the lazy way of explaining it, because you don’t have to get to an answer so quick.

So, that’s really where the thought started was there has to be a better way, and in the end, hence Better Pitch. And then Jeremy and I started having those conversations about, okay, so how do we bring this to life?

Darren:

Because Jeremy, I think it’s probably really important that we establish what we mean by the pitch, because I think a lot of people may have different ideas. But when you look and hear and talk to people, there’s pretty much a fairly consistent approach that marketers take. One being a very procurement driven one, the RFP, and the other being the sort of beauty parade, isn’t it?

Jeremy:

Yeah, very much so. I’ve been around pitching from running pitches and taking part in pitches for several decades, if I’m honest about it. And the biggest observation really is in that time, the pitching process doesn’t really seem to have changed very much. It’s still driven by the same principles that were established when advertising was a lot less complicated than it is now.

So, what I see happening is that the pitch requirement becomes much more demanding and much more varied, but the process has not really moved on. And I think that’s behind a lot of the stresses and strains behind it, and the perceptions that the process is broken, certainly needs amending, would be my observation.

Darren:

Yeah. Because watching Mad Men, it was such a beautiful scene to see Don Draper there weaving his storytelling magic around the clients, but pitches in some ways are still like that, in that it’s all about the work, but it’s become a lot more complicated.

Mark, there is more to pitching these days than just coming up with a good idea. And I know from running pitches for the last 25 years, clients very rarely only choose the idea that they like.

Mark:

Yeah. I mean, I think that’s where we can use your word broken again. I think what’s actually broken is that the default to this sort of outdated, traditional, let’s call it bloated process. I think clients have … and agency to some extent as well, don’t help themselves, but fall into that trap of just kind of doing the same thing again for whatever reason. Whether it’s because of time or because they can’t think of what would be better.

I think clients though, are looking for so much more. You think about the world that we’re in, whether it’s the new technology that we have, the options that consumers have in front of them, how complex media is these days. All of these things, agencies have got a lot more to sell, it isn’t just that narrow sort of single-minded proposition and skillset or capability set that the agencies in the past had.

So, now, clients I think don’t necessarily have the skillset to explore that. So, they use an outdated process in a world, which is completely different in many ways. And I think some clients, whether it’s the marketing team or the procurement teams, they do get it. They are able to navigate through it.

But I would say on the whole, and the conversations that Jeremy and I have had with various people, don’t really understand how to get the best out of their agency. And there’s almost a bigger question here as well, how do you get the best out of your agency? But just specifically in a pitch process, in a pitch sense, how do you get from A to B?

And A to B for me, really is around how do you find the agency that’s going to help you create some amazing work? And that could be in a number of different ways these days.

Darren:

Yeah, I mean Jeremy, I’m sure you and I can remember a time when media was as simple as some broadcast TV, some out of home, bit of press, some magazine, radio – you pretty much had it all covered.

Now, we’re in a world where media channels are as complex and complicated and as prolific as anything, it really is a lot more complex. And yet, to Mark’s point, the pitch process still focuses on very narrow tests of capability, doesn’t it?

Jeremy:

It does. So, a lot of tradition involved in that. And I think that is driven by agencies quite a lot, as well as by clients, because whatever they say, agencies love to present big ideas. They think that’s the lifeblood, and they moan about it, but that’s what they like to talk about, and that’s what they like to present. So, they do it very well.

And you’re right, back in the day, the pitch used to be, “Here’s a great idea.” Which went on for 45 minutes, and then the 10 minutes, the media guy stood up and said, “Here’s a spreadsheet and the budget,” and that was the end of it.

So, that doesn’t really reflect where we are now. And I do think that’s the biggest part of this. The Mad Men world is … I think is still remembered with great affection even by people who never lived through it. They still see that as being the glory of the business, and that’s why we do it.

And all the sharp thinking that says, well, things have moved on, it’s much more comfy and it kind of goes out the window when it comes to starting your stuff and showing off, which a lot of agency people still very much like to do, whether they admit it or not.

Darren:

Yeah. Because the other thing we’re seeing Mark is … I’d say the two thousands, the early two thousands, we started to see the specialist agencies popping up everywhere. There seemed to be a specialist agency, digital agencies, where now everything’s digital; social media agencies, we’ve got influencer agencies that manage influence. There’s so many different specialists.

We’ve even got to the point now that we’re seeing the big holding companies and some of the big independent agencies starting to consolidate all those specialties, trying to cram them all back into one group and become the one stop shop that existed 20, 30 years ago.

I mean, this is a really complicated offering in the marketplace, and yet the pitch process, in some ways, has become more burdensome as it tries to adapt to it. But it has by bolting things on, rather than just reinventing itself for a modern era, is pretty much to the point that you were making before. Is it broken? Well, if it’s broken, how is it? It’s broken because instead of changing itself, it’s sort of just bolted extra bits onto it, hasn’t it?

Mark:

Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I suppose that change that we’ve seen where … it’s almost a cyclical thing, isn’t it? It’s kind of specialist agencies, then they’re group together, then they break apart again.

And I suppose really, what we’re seeing nowadays is that, if I come back to that word bloated process, I think that the requirement that’s needed to identify the kind of skill sets that you need for your partner agencies is almost being put to the back. And the extra bits are being added into the process to try and kind of find their way through.

So, the bloated process that we talk about, whether it’s the ever-growing RFI that’s required first, all the information that’s required. Not saying that none of that’s important, but there’s a lot of that that comes up front, and it takes a very, very long time. A lot of that, I think clients will be able to find that out relatively straightforward, or there’ll be some single points that they really need to know.

That’s just one example of this bloated process that I think is almost a substitute for really asking the really difficult questions. Well, they’re easy questions, they’re just difficult to answer. And that for me, I think is how we change the pitching process.

So, back to that word again, that we always use, it’s not broken, just need to make it more appropriate? We may need to make it more fit for purpose in the world that we’re in today.

Darren:

Yeah, because I don’t think it’s remained fit for purpose, because it’s trying to adapt to the changing landscape of agencies in a way that has kept the very core concept on immediate … if you’re pitching or wanting to select a media agency, you’re still going in and asking them about things like media rates that they’re buying at.

And yet so much of media now, the rate’s almost irrelevant in some ways because it’s more about channel selection and making sure you’re optimizing those channels in a real time bidding digital world. None of that is actually being tested by some of those old school methodologies that were built into a pitch process.

Mark:

Yeah, I agree. But let’s look at the thing … what is it that really makes a long-term successful client agency relationship? And for me, a lot of that comes to the personalities, the cultural fit. Yes, it’s about skill sets. Yes, it’s about capabilities, of course, it is. Have they done great work in the past? Yes, of course, that’s all important.

But really, as we know, the relationship between client and agency and being able to maintain that overtime, that’s the key to a lot of successful partnerships and outcomes. And let’s not forget, that’s the purpose of a pitch, is to create that relationship and to create that work that comes out the back of it. So, sometimes I think we might almost lose sight of really what that pitch process is about.

Darren:

It was interesting because when I got into pitching … well, running pitches, there was an old school pitch consultant, Peter McDonald was around at the time, and his argument was that chemistry and cultural alignment was the table stake, and capability and competency were the variables.

And I quickly corrected him, and we disagreed for years until he left the industry. And I said, it’s actually the other way around. Because most agencies are very good at building capability and competency, but the magic ingredient, the one that you can never be sure that you’re going to bring to the table, is going to be the chemistry, it’s an indefinable.

And chemistry is more than just we like each other. It’s that there’s this sense of cultural alignment that creates an opportunity for trust to develop, or at least for both parties to feel like there’s the possibility of a respectful and trusted relationship will evolve and build out of this. And yet very few … especially I find the procurement approach of sending the NRFP to spend hours and hours slaving over, filling out all these details on capability, almost never deals with culture and chemistry. Jeremy, what’s your thoughts?

Jeremy:

I agree, there’s a lot there to unpick, but yes, I agree. Now, I think one of those pitches straight off is that not enough time has been spent. In most pitches that I’ve come across and been involved with, is there’s not enough time spent in setting the thing up, not enough time spent in understanding what the client issues are, why the pitch is taking place, what they really need from it, what the relative strengths they require are from the agency they’re looking for.

And I think you have to build that understanding really carefully before you start putting together a brief for the kind of agency they want and getting out there, and assembling a list of people they should meet.

And yes, chemistry is really important. I think a big part of the job that people like the three of us here is to assess the culture of the client we’re talking to, understand the way they work, so that we can start to bring our knowledge of the way the agencies we know work and the kind of cultures they bring, as well as the skill sets.

And we have attached a lot of importance to that, into the way we’ve constructed Better Pitch to give the agencies maximum opportunity to really demonstrate what they’re good at and the way they work.

So, an example I’d give is that when we run the chemistry session, that first meeting, there is a big temptation in the traditional way pitches are run. But just to say, if the agency will just turn up and talk about itself for an hour, which they do, and they do it on the whole pretty badly if they don’t really know what they’re supposed to be talking about.

So, they’ll chart out the usual stuff, and it might be relevant or it might not. They probably won’t allow enough time for the conversation to develop. So, what I found in my experience to work really well is to be very, I was going to say prescriptive, not quite the right word – but to give a very clear brief for that section-

Darren:

A defined brief.

Jeremy:

A defined brief. It says here’s what they’re looking for, here’s the kind of thing they want you to do, here’s a question for you, but make sure you spend not too much time telling them every single detail there is to be mentioned about your agency, which is interesting, but hopefully, they read most of it already. But be relevant, talk about the thing which is relevant about you and the brief, and prepare for a conversation as well as just a standup presentation.

Darren:

Because it cracks me up agencies that come in and start telling clients what they do as an agency. And yet most of it is exactly what the previous four or five agencies have done as well. Because if we’re trying to define ourselves or distinguish ourselves based on what we do, virtually every agency in any category would do largely the same thing.

One of my favorite slides is where they come to their strategy process, the brand insight, the category insight, the consumer insight. Oh my God, it’s three circles that overlap in the center, and somehow that Venn diagram-

Jeremy:

There’s the insight, there it is right there.

Darren:

“Oh my God, this is the agency I need, they can do Venn diagrams.” It’s really difficult, it appears, for agencies, but also for clients as well, because I find that they don’t know what questions to ask necessarily.

And so, what you end up with is a process where the agencies come in and talk and talk and talk about themselves, and then the client goes, “Oh, that’s what I wanted to know.” The thing you haven’t told me becomes the thing I want you to tell me. The other thing we’ve seen in … sorry?

Jeremy:

I was going to say or they’ll come after 45 minutes of the hour of the chemistry session, the client will suddenly go, “Here’s my killer question …” because he just thought of it. Here’s my killer question, and then there’s like a five-minute discussion on what everyone actually really wants to talk about, and then the meeting’s finished.

So, let’s try and define that kind of question before the thing starts, and get people prepared and able to talk about it.

Mark:

But how crazy is that? Because this is an industry which is creative, and you’ve got a lot of big egos, let’s say, who are very keen to show off and to show their differences. But the reality is, when it comes to it, there’s a fear of doing something that’s a little bit different to the people that have just been in the room. So, you all end up doing the same thing. And that’s the madness of this, isn’t it?

And I guess goes back to the beginning where in my head, this just doesn’t add up. I’ve been in the agency world for 30 years, and I’ve seen it and I’ve fallen afoul of this myself. And then conversations with Jeremy, it’s kinda like, “Hang on, why aren’t we trying to find a better way of doing this? Why are we all just copying each other and doing the same thing?”

Darren:

The reason they do, because when I sit in and agency asks me to look at their credentials, and they start presenting it to me, and we get six slides in, and I go, “Right, well, we’ve just spent 15 minutes and six slides with you explaining to me you’re an advertising agency. I’m really, really feeling like that that was a really valuable use of our time.” Why?

I say to them all the time, I don’t go to a doctor and have them spend 15 minutes of the consultation telling me what a doctor does. My lawyer has never bothered to tell me what a lawyer does. What is it about advertising that agencies feel that they have to spend 15, 20 minutes telling me what the agency does?

It’s bizarre in that, for communicators, we are not particularly … well as an industry, agencies are not particularly good at actually communicating their value proposition. They default to here’s what we do.

It’s like our builders trying to sell you why you should build your home: “Well, I’ve got a hammer, and I’ve got a circular saw, and I can use them both.” It’s like really? Why don’t you show me what you’ve done? Or tell me your thoughts on the house I’m thinking of building or whatever, that’s going to be much more engaging for me than telling me, “I’ve got a hammer.”

Mark:

But it’s so true. We’ve spent a bit of time looking outside of the creative world, and lots of service industries. Yes, pitching is a big part of it, and we all acknowledge that pitching is a big part of it, but we’ve looked at that and it’s kind of funny analogies.

But the truth is, a lot of service sectors, they are looking at cultural alignment. They are looking at how do we collaborate within the process of pitching. They are looking at how are we matched. It’s a bit of a dating exercise in some ways, isn’t it? That is an important part of it. I’m sure we’ve all been on those-

Darren:

Without the confirmation, let’s hope. Because usually only one party gets fucked.

Mark:

Well, you had it going on that one.

Darren:

I’m sorry-

Mark:

Don’t edit that bit out.

Darren:

No, I wasn’t going to. Because you opened the metaphor and it’s one that’s used a lot. People talk about it being dating and one-night stands and this sort of marriage. I mean, it’s a professional relationship, but it is one built on alignment of values, alignment of cultures, and really understanding each other.

The other big thing that’s happened though, and the thing that pitching has not come to terms with (and Mark, you would’ve been absolutely aware of this), is the move from choosing an agency for a long-term marriage. It used to be like 5, 10, 20 years to now going through a pitch to basically have a one-night stand to continue your metaphor with a project.

Oh, I’ve got a project, I’ve got a couple of hundred thousand pounds that I want to spend on this project, and I’m going to go to a pitch and make everyone do this work. I mean, it really is inappropriate, isn’t it?

Mark:

It totally is. I’ve got a number of examples that spring to mind when you mention this. I pitched not so long ago for a beer brand, and they didn’t really kind of take us through the journey of what they were expecting, many rounds. And it became evident at the end that actually they just wanted us to give them the play book that they could use and apply across all their brands.

And it was a project, and the process itself was so inappropriate. And you have to kind of protect your own dignity if you like in terms of what you are prepared to sell for such a price. So, you go through such a process and at the end, there’s not really a prize.

I mean, the same for a six-month process of working with a massive insurance company. It was a six-month process. We had everyone in the agency from the chairman down. There was hordes of people across those six months. There was a presentation on one day to about 30 clients. I mean, it was crazy. And do you know how many pieces of work we got out of it at the end? None. Because it was run by procurement, it was just for the roster.

And again, that whole process was massively bloated. There was no real sight of the prize, (the agency probably was partly at fault in not pushing that clarity again). But again, back to that fear of being different, fear of asking the wrong question, it is tricky sometimes.

So, if we can build a better pitch process that avoids some of this, I think for the agencies, of course, it’s good news, but I think also for the clients. We talk a lot about the difficulties that the agencies have, but I think more and more so clients are beginning to realize that this is not appropriate for them either.

Darren:

Well, it’s funny you say that. I had a number of clients over the last few years, particularly post-COVID for some reason, that have come to me and said, “Look, we went to a pitch. It wasn’t that we’re unhappy with our incumbent agency, but we just wanted to know what else was out there. Got halfway through the process and realized not much.” And even that is a huge waste of everyone’s time.

There’s so many better ways of checking out what’s out there without taking your incumbent and any agency you invite into the process, into a pitch. I mean, I think every new businessperson in London would give their right arm just to have a chance to go and talk to a client about what they could do for them without it necessarily being a pitch.

I don’t know why there’s this thing about creating this huge legal framework just to have a conversation to see what else is out there. It disadvantages the incumbents too.

Jeremy:

Yeah.

Darren:

Sorry, Jeremy.

Jeremy:

Well, I think pitching has become such a behemoth in the advertising industry. It’s kind of when the agencies talk amongst themselves, the management team gets together, they say, “Well, pitching is the lifeblood of the business, and we got to do it.” And it’s regarded as being really important.

One of the things that got me interested in looking at this process again, was the strains which pitching puts upon the teams involved in it, but I guess particularly, in the agency teams, but everyone else as well.

And the bloated process is the thing that drives so much of that. I’m not just talking about a six-month process for a pitch, I’ve come across pitches that have gone on for even longer than that, and there’ll be no results, who knows? Nothing ever comes back. So, blows your process, lack of feedback.

So, one of the things we’ve really focused on with Better Pitch is to talk about doing it fast. Advertising is a fast-moving business. Doing things across months is not really in the DNA of the way people work. And it’s, I think to everyone’s advantage to make sure that things happen in a timely manner.

Giving people endless time to respond to something just means they’ll take endless time to put their thoughts together, give them a week, and they’ll do it in a week. And you’ll probably learn no more if months taken than if you give them a week.

So, doing things fast, timely, but quicker is a big part of what we’re trying to achieve with Better Pitch to take some of that unnecessary process out, keep people involved, keep them focused and get to a better result.

Darren:

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because a lot of people are inclined to think that pitches can’t be faster, because when you’re doing speculative creative work, the marketers will want to give the agency enough time, and that could be six to eight weeks to develop it. What they don’t realize is the agency will be spinning their wheels second guessing them.

Isn’t that right, Mark? When you’re doing a second guess speculative creative, you’ll spend a lot of time actually second guessing and reworking and coming up with more ideas and more ideas, because you’re not getting that feedback from the client that you would get if you’re actually in a relationship. It’s totally in a vacuum.

Mark:

Absolutely. We’ve all done this millions of times, I’m sure, where we ask a few questions. Of course, we do get some answers back, but the reality is that process hasn’t really been considered clearly enough, and the agency is then in a bit of a vacuum. You’re absolutely right, creating some great work, but it’s almost, is it really answering the brief, and is it really going to be something that they use later on?

So, it comes back to the sort of what’s appropriate. There’s an awful lot of waste. We actually had a really good conversation with a large agency group, and they were talking about the waste that the process can create.

So, I think on the agency’s side, of course, I think there is a lot of that, which it can be improved. But interestingly, I think on the client side that there’s a lot … one thing that just sticks in my mind, and Jeremy, I think you’ll remember this when we were speaking with the procurement director, it was agencies now are more aware of CMOs that are sort of, let’s say, behaving badly in this taking advantage, dud pitch briefs and what have you. That does get sort of shared and that reputation follows you around.

And I think agencies are becoming a little bit wiser to it. And so, one of the drawbacks I think, for clients is, you are reducing your pool of choice agencies in some ways, if that is the way that you operate. It’s not really the brand as such, it’s more the actual CMO or the marketing director or what have you.

So, I think that that is one point that really stood out. And actually, we haven’t really kind of considered too much, but it was something which came out in some of the conversations we’ve been having. I think it’s quite an interesting observation.

Darren:

Yeah, so we haven’t run this in the UK, but we’ve been running the state of the pitch, it’s just going into the third round. It’s been done in Canada through our friends at Campaign. And what that’s finding is that agencies are actually … there are things that marketers and procurement teams are doing that is causing real angst and frustration for agencies. And that emotional response is actually having an impact.

And the impact is particularly in really the hot independent agencies, where they’re able to make those decisions for themselves as starting to become much fussier in which brands and which marketers they actually pitch for. They’re asking more questions upfront, and if they’re not getting the answers, then they’re choosing not to participate. This is the handful of agencies that are in that position financially to be able to do that.

But it’s interesting, for all of the angst that we are seeing in the industry, all of the frustration, all of the anger that’s coming through in these articles in the trade media, there hasn’t been a lot done. And one of the criticisms is, “Well, you guys are pitch consultants, what are you doing about it?”

And the answer that I have to that is that, I now have quantified from Canada and Australia that only 20% of pitches are actually being managed by pitch consultants, or as they say in London, intermediaries.

But in London, you seem to have more intermediaries by the pound than anyone else. I mean, there’s almost one on every street or the corner of every street hawking their ways. What is it that stops an intermediary actually reinventing or optimizing the pitch process?

Mark:

How honest do you want us to be?

Darren:

You can be as honest as you like.

Jeremy:

Well, honestly, I think there’s a lot of lip service paid to the need to realize the pitch process, acknowledging what primarily the agents are saying. But I think when it comes right down to it, and the brief comes in, and you’ve got to answer that brief inside whatever, you’ve got to get back and respond and say, “Here’s my process, let’s do this.”

It’s too short, a time to actually go through the process of revising the pitch process. So, everyone defaults back to where they were before, and you’ll hear some consultants saying, “Yeah, we know it needs revising. We know, we know. Believe me, in two years’ time, we’re going to have something that’s really going to be checking the market up and be different.”

But it’s continually, put back, postponed because the needs are too immediate, and frankly, the clients are not really asking for it, because the clients are not as dissatisfied with the process as the agencies are. So, they’re not putting the pressure onto the consultancy to change things. Well, certainly that was a lot of pressure.

Darren:

Yeah, we saw that with Pitch Positive Pledge, something that TrinityP3 UK signed to as an intermediary, and the ISBA, and the IPA got quite a lot of agencies. I think there was a few hundred, there was quite a lot of intermediaries – not a lot of clients signing up to it.

Jeremy:

No. Some, but not many.

Darren:

Yeah. Do you think that’s the point, is that clients see the process? Well, it works and it’s not causing pressure to us. I can’t actually believe that because so many marketers will sit on stages at Cannes, at Marketing Week in London, at the ANA in the U.S. and tell us how important it is to work with your agencies to get the best work.

And yet, you’ll default to a process that you would have to say is almost unanimously derided or criticized by agencies because it’s just hopelessly out of date and bloated. So, I think marketers want to do the right thing, do you think it’s possible that they just don’t know what the right thing is anymore?

Jeremy:

Well, I think that’s entirely the point. I think they don’t get a chance or don’t have the impetus to sit back and say, “Well, how would I do this better? What would make it better?” They look for advice on how to do that, I don’t think it’s forthcoming. I’m sure there is frustration those shortcomings of the way the process has worked. And I talk to clients about the fact that this process hasn’t changed in 20, 30 years, and they nod along.

For some reason, I think trying to approach it as an industry and say, “Well, all the consultants in London must get together and decide how to do this better” is not going to work because frankly, they all compete with each other and why the hell would they share their best practice with anybody else?

So, someone’s got to grasp this nettle and just do something. That’s a big part of what this has been driving Mark and myself on with the last few months putting this together. We had a chance to stand back and say, “Let’s just take a fresh look at this. Let’s talk to some people about the true issues they’re facing. Let’s hear from the three parties, from the agencies, from procurement people, and from the clients. Let’s take that on board and attend to it.” And we had a chance to do it, and we’ve done it.

Darren:

Yeah, Mark, you’re the mastermind here. So, what is The Better Pitch? What is the sort of thinking and the philosophy behind it that’s going to actually drive change?

Mark:

Well, I think to start with, what is a better pitch? I suppose really it goes back to the points I think we’ve been making earlier on, which is about one that really ensures that you get to a great client agency relationship. And it’s real world, I think really that’s, in a nutshell, what a better pitch is.

Jeremy touched earlier on, fast. We actually have our five Fs, which we enjoy talking about, but they are our guiding principles in many ways of what makes a pitch better: fast, fit, focused, flexible, and fun. I won’t spend too much time on all of those, but the fun one, which is at the end there, really is the one that should be at the beginning.

I think we forget sometimes that the industry that we’re in, that creative energy and inspiration, that comes from having fun, even for serious topics, that’s such a core part of what agencies are able to deliver, and which clients buy into.

So, there are sort of five guiding principles to what a better pitch is, but it’s all guiding the process. And it’s a flexible process really into something that ultimately gets us to that client agency relationship in a way that isn’t false, and it’s a real-world setting, basically.

Darren:

Yeah. Where did the thinking come from again?

Mark:

So, I suppose it comes from a number of conversations. In the back of your mind, you are always wondering I think, why is it like this? As I say, the thing that really sparked it off was a conversation with an ex-colleague and he was telling me about the pitches that he was in that they’d been running. And one particular one stood out, and everything about it was what we all despise in pitching.

And again, we come back to that point. We’re talking about it from an agency perspective, but I do really think that the client perspective is just as important. I think clients are looking short-termist about things more of the time. So, I think that’s part of the explanation as to why they don’t see these things. But ultimately, they are going to be dissatisfied with the agency’s output, with that relationship. You don’t get a chance to build that relationship.

If you look at some of the great work that’s out there, there are agency relationships that have been long-lasting. So, that dissatisfaction, I think from a client side is a driver. I think also there is a moral responsibility that I think clients in this day and age, are becoming more and more sort of attuned to really, and that how you operate and how you conduct yourself and how you engage with the agencies in a pitch is really important.

So, I think, all of those things wrapped up really just brings us back to that starting point of asking the question how do we do a better pitch? Not how do we fix a broken pitch process, but how do we do a better pitch?

Darren:

Yeah. And I think the first step is let’s bring some fun back into it. One of the reasons I got into running pitches was that in the last two years at J. Walter Thompson in Australia as a creative director, I was involved in a lot of pitches. And that was a time when the agency was excited about being in a pitch. Pitches added energy, there was fun to be had to be in a pitch.

Yeah, it was great to win, but even the journey of pulling everyone together and delivering the presentation and seeing the client’s reaction and seeing that as the start of building a relationship was so important. It’s just like someone sucked the oxygen out of the room somewhere along the line, and the pitch process has become so dull and so boring and so labored.

And yet we’ve forgotten that this is hopefully the start of a relationship that’s going to produce amazing ideas and great insights and fabulous strategy that has the power to drive businesses and improve top-line revenue and bottom-line profit. It’s almost like the procurement is made it the same as, I don’t know, buying stationery, or-

Jeremy:

Accountancy, yeah. Appointing a new accountant would be my simile. An old interview with Leo Burnett I guess back in the mountain days, but he said, “We mustn’t forget that the sheer joy of creating advertising and the thrill that comes from it, the creative climate of the place didn’t matter as much as the money to the special breed of people who work in agencies.” So, he knew it.

And I think we forget that at our peril, and I so strongly agree that if you suck all the fun out of the pitch process, then you’re going to set up a relationship based on false premises or inadequate premises. So, yeah, that is something we’re having to do.

Darren:

Sorry, Jeremy. I don’t think it’s just going back to having agencies present ideas, this is not show and tell. We’ve moved way beyond that because the problem with that show and tell approach is we’re showing and telling a very small part of what agencies do in this day and age. With all of the diversity of channels and thinking and opportunities, just doing an ad is not going to prove that the agency has that ability.

So, it’s about finding the fun in the process, building the fun into the process without having to make it to do the work that you’re going to … because it’s flawed. The point that you made before, Mark, that creating advertising without that intimate relationship with a client, getting the constant regular feedback, having those arguments, which will never happen in pitches.

Everyone’s on their best behavior, first of all, and secondly, the agency’s not in a position to challenge the client’s thinkings. So, they’ll only ever produce what they think the client will buy. And yet, we know that the best client agency relationships push the client further beyond their natural boundaries. We’ve got to find a way of actually discovering that, and what part of Better Pitch is focused on that.

Mark:

So, through the process, as I say, we are not reinventing a lot of the steps in this. I think Jeremy pointed out at the beginning, we are asking that question a little bit more strongly about should you even go to pitch? That is a really important starting point, if we assume that the answer is yes.

There’s a couple of parts within our process, and we’ve kind of stolen a few sort of in a bit of inspiration from theater and film. So, we’ve got kind of two stages. One’s sort of the reading and one’s the audition. With the reading, we’ve used a thing called Petra Kutcher as a sort of a guiding principle for how an agency can communicate a bit about themselves. It’s not a creds, it’s 20 slides or 20 images, and you have 20 seconds for each one, 6 minutes, 40 seconds to talk about your agency.

I can challenge any agency, however good they are, to do that in 6 minutes, 40 seconds in a way that is compelling, exciting, but you are forced to do that. And actually, I think agencies will find that refreshing, I think clients will find it refreshing. And the conversations we’ve had, they all look at this and they go, “Yeah, do you know what, that is just such a better way of getting across who we are.”

And the stage after that is, if we call it the audition, the reality here is that what is an appropriate way of engaging in a client setting, let’s call it a workshop at the moment. But it could be an event, it could be that you are … it could be a particular venue. It could be that you invited a guest speaker as part of that process.

It’s a couple of hours workshop, but it’s looking at a real-world problem in a setting that allows the client and the agencies to build an idea and a thought process together in a setting that is a little bit more fun. But again, it goes back to what’s appropriate. We call it an audition, but the audition could be in any setting, really.

So, again, what we’re trying to do is inject that fun. We are looking at our five Fs, trying to make it a little bit faster, trying to get that fit, the cultural engagement part as part of that. And again, when we’ve spoken to clients, agencies, procurement, they look at this and they can see the power of this. One size does not fit all, and that’s the thing here, but we’ve got our guiding view.

And that’s really how we bring all of that, that sort of cultural fit, the fun, all of those things back into that process. And you’ve got a better chance then of building that relationship and seeing it for what it really is.

Darren:

And there’s going to be the procurement naysayers out there that go, “Oh, yes, but it’s all about risk mitigation. We need to get the agencies to fill out that extended RFP so we can assess what’s their position on modern slavery and what are they doing about gender equality and workplace safety, and all of the other issues that we need to tick those boxes.”

Which seem to have become almost like in many ways, the dominant focus rather than focusing on the important parts. But there’s ways of streamlining that as well. I’m assuming that focused, one of your Fs is where you need to be focused on getting the basics right as well.

Mark:

Yeah, I mean, the process itself is what we’re trying to do, is we’re trying to keep it lean. We’re trying to build it in a way that’s appropriate for that brief. But absolutely in the background, look, undoubtedly, they’re going to be important questions that the client really needs to be aware of.

And goes back to the beginning really, where you kind of go, let’s understand the brief properly, what are the things that are must-haves? And we can work that into the process ourselves, on behalf of the client to make sure that the pool of agencies that are in front of them doing all the important and interesting things, we’ve done all that at the checking.

But it’s about asking the right questions at the beginning and making sure that you haven’t just got a sort of a templated version of a brief. We really drill into these things. We need to look at the attributes that we are looking for in an agency. We spend a lot of time in a workshop with them. When I say a long time, it’s an hour or a couple of hours, but we really drill into those things, and we guide the client into understanding what they are.

To the point where (and I’ve seen it many, many times) you’ve got a group of people in the room who probably contradict each other to start with, but by the end of it, you’ve got everyone talking in the same language, looking at the same things that they are trying to achieve. There’s a real art in doing that. Clients cannot do that stuff themselves. And there’s a real power in that because I think it fuels the process.

So, all of that stuff that you talk about, absolutely. I think if I’m being quite honest and quite blunt about it, that’s just laziness. It’s because they don’t know what else to do, so they just revert back to all these component parts that make it bloated. That’s because they haven’t really thought it through. I think for all of what the Pitch Positive Pledge, the three Ps, it’s a great thing. But that just talks about what everyone should be doing. It doesn’t really guide you in how to do that.

And I think what we’ve got here with Better Pitch really sits within or on top of the Pitch Positive Pledge. It enhances that. It gives some level of solution to what they’ve been talking about. So, I think we work in harmony with it in many ways.

Darren:

So, if there’s listeners that are interested in finding out more, they can obviously check out the website betterpitch.co.uk. What are they going to find there? Because I believe you’ve been building some tools to go on there.

Mark:

You cut out slightly there, Darren. Was that a question to me or to Jeremy? You talked about the Better Pitch tools.

Darren:

So, yeah. So, if people are interested in more information, they can go to betterpitch.co.uk, to find out more about The Better Pitch. Mark, but you’ve been working on some tools there that people can actually use and get some ideas.

Mark:

We’d love to talk to anybody about the process, because I think there’s some real power as I say in that. But we’ve got some tools and some checkers, which you can go online.

So, we’ve got our Better Pitch check, which really is the start of the process. It’s looking at should I really be pitching? And it’s a really simple check. It’s just asking a few questions, and then our AI powered checker will kind of spit back to you some thoughts about what you should be doing for each of those questions, an overall idea of whether you should be pitching.

We’ve got our target attributes for the agency where we run a workshop. We’ve got our pitch cost calculator, so you can kind of have a look at how long does it really take, and what is the cost really for running these pitches.

The pitch coaching service as well as you’ll find on the website, and also the agency register. So, you can have a look at the agencies that are in our register, and you can kind of interrogate the agency types that you’re looking for and any of the attributes and skills that you are looking for.

So, these are all things that we use to sort of help fuel the overall process. But you can dive in and have a look at some of these things yourselves on the website.

Darren:

Because Jeremy, a lot of marketers think that they should be able to run the pitch, and the numbers from the state of the pitching again, in Canada and Australia, are showing that around half the pitches run, it may be different in the UK, but half the pitches that are run are run by marketers. It sounds like there’s some opportunities here for them to lift their pitch game.

Jeremy:

Oh, most definitely, yeah. I think that’s a big task for us. I think it’s been unfair to say to a trained marketer, “You must be able to run a pitch.” I mean, why? They’re never trained to run a pitch, why should we assume they’d be great at it? And why would it be a bad thing to get someone to advise on how to do it better?

So, we don’t know the exact proportions in the UK. I suspect there are slightly more intermediary involved pitches than there are in some other parts of the world. But for sure, there are still a lot of procurement people employed by the client organization who are expected to run pitches. And there are marketing people expected to run pitches.

They shouldn’t be ashamed that they might need some help with it, or they might get a better result with some expert input. And that’s a task for us to tackle. Looking forward to it.

Darren:

Well, look, I think it’s a terrific innovation, it’s a terrific approach. Well done to you, Mark, and to Jeremy, because It’ll be really interesting to see how marketers and agencies embrace the Better Pitch. Thanks for joining me and having the conversation.

Jeremy:

Thank you, Darren. Thanks for having me.

Mark:

Can you have us back and we’ll give you an update in a … let’s see how we really get on with these conversations that we are going to be having over the coming months.

Darren:

Well, I think let’s reconvene in six months and see what the industry reaction’s been.

Mark:

Yeah, would love to.

Jeremy:

Let’s do it.

Darren:

But thank you. Bye.