Anton Buchner, TrinityP3 Senior Consultant and known as the ROI Guy, has managed and facilitated some of the country’s most interesting and nuanced pitches over the past decade.
Since the pandemic, agencies around the world have been increasingly vocal about ditching the pitch, and trade media have run headlines and opinion pieces claiming it is broken and even dead.
As Australia’s and APAC’s leading pitch consultancy, we noticed that while there were plenty of opinions, there was very little data on this topic, so we undertook our own research called The State of the Pitch in Australia.
One of the more interesting insights was the breadth of the disciplines’ research, particularly Data, CRM, Loyalty, Technology, Digital, and SAAS development. Anton discusses the implications for marketers and procurement who want to select agencies and suppliers to meet their needs in these growing categories.
You can download your copy of the State of the Pitch Australia Report for free here.
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I’m hoping the digital strategy gets dropped at the next one. Still lingering. We see digital strategies; we keep reminding clients that there is only one strategy.
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 wisdoms from our guests each week.
Continuing our series on The State of the Pitch in Australia research, one of the more interesting insights was the breadth of disciplines, particularly data, CRM, loyalty, technology, digital, and SaaS development.
Well, my guest today is responsible for managing and facilitating some of the most interesting and nuanced pictures in this country over the past decade and is here to discuss the implications for marketers and procurement, wanting to select agencies and suppliers to meet their needs in these growing categories.
Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, TrinityP3 senior consultant, and the ROI guy, Anton Buchner. I don’t know if to call you Anton or the ROI guy.
Anton:
Oh, mate, you can call me what you want. But good to be back with you, Darren. How are you?
Darren:
I’m feeling like you’re becoming synonymous with your handle. Let’s hope so.
Anton:
I told someone else about that recently, and he’s a manager of B2B company. I said, “Oh, by the way, if you see me on LinkedIn, you’ll see my name as the ROI guy.” He goes, “I love that. I’m dealing with someone at the moment. It doesn’t measure anything. Right. I’ll give you a call.”
Darren:
Fantastic. Now, look, one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation was that we’ve got this research, and a lot of it shows a very traditional approach.
But I wouldn’t mind starting off discussing some of the pitches you’ve run that are actually not the run of the mill, are they? I mean, I remember you being asked to help a client choose a new call center. That’s right, isn’t it?
Anton:
Oh, yeah. We’ve had a few round there. I mean, we’ve had some fascinating ones. And call centers, I came through the industry of when Foxtel set up their own call center. So, I got from a very early stage in my career, armed and dangerous around call centers.
But of course, they’re critical. Yeah, we had a tender for a contact center, and they’re not easy because it’s a real mix of crisis management, call handling time around operational and functional things, billing inquiries, et cetera.
Can’t access their individual ID number, can’t access their website, through to upselling cross-selling product information and people who want to call in if you want to call in these days.
I do note that I get the standard line of people going, “Millennials, we’re targeting them. They don’t call in, they want to talk to a chat bot.”
So, yeah, but contact centers are unto themselves and very unique landscapes and very unique situations.
Darren:
Well, yeah. I remember a pitch that started with the client phoning up saying, “I need new digital agency.” And why do you need a new digital agency? “Well, I need a digital strategy. I’ve just come out of presenting my marketing strategy to the board and they said there wasn’t enough digital in it. I’m not sure how you weigh that up.”
But what we actually decided was that they didn’t need another digital agency because they had four agencies on their roster already, or purporting to provide digital, but they actually needed to develop a strategy.
And so, we took them through the process of finding the right company to help facilitate that digital strategy process.
So, it’s actually quite interesting the things that come out that start off being quite seeming run of the mill, but when you ask a few questions, you actually get to the bottom of it.
You also, had one for in-store design, didn’t you? Or in-store technical fit out or something?
Anton:
Oh, yeah. Yes, in terms of-
Darren:
That was in Korea.
Anton:
In Korea, digitizing retail and point of sale experiences as well. So, really, it was experiential hub at retail. So, they were investing huge amounts of money but had existing suppliers that seemed to be, from our perspective, waiting their dollars, or their yen, I should say. Or Korea, what is it? The-
Darren:
The won.
Anton:
The won, that’s right. Sorry, mental blank. With too many zeroes. So, we helped them get back to a sensible situation.
But yeah, that was fascinating because it was everything from interactive kiosks, to interactive rooms, to be able to manage music, to be able to manage the full experience from apps, from mobile.
Darren:
And of course, with your focus around data analytics and customer value, we’ve had a rise in the number of pitches recently where clients are actually going to market looking for either a consumer data platform, customer data platform, MMMs.
Whether that’s media mix modeling or marketing mix modeling and the like. They’re also, quite fascinating pitch processes, aren’t they?
Anton:
Yeah. And some of those aren’t easy because we did have one very unique one that started with technology and just wanted to look at the tech platforms out there.
And you’re right, as we dug into it, we needed to understand their infrastructure. So, we needed to understand what environment they had.
But ultimately, they were open to really any solution. That could have been open source or fully integrated into their systems. But we got them to shift focus and say, “It’s not really about the technology, it’s about agency capability that can obviously use those types of technologies.”
But again, think of the strategy and think of what they have to achieve. And had a particularly complex business, so it wasn’t a one size fit all. It was definitely some unique agencies with unique skill sets that even could find solutions.
But it was right back to strategy to then go, “Okay, let’s then think of how we can apply technology to these problems and solve the problems with the client.” So, yeah, that was a very interesting one.
But they were a great client and really moved through the process of shifting their IT department, both locally and globally, to think more around what the problems were and what the solutions could be.
Darren:
Well, and we also, had a insurance company that was going full in on, I think it was Salesforce. And the pitch brief was, “So, what agencies do we need to change (interestingly) to help us better utilize Salesforce?”
It was interesting how they’d automatically made the connection between the technology platform that they were implementing internally and the need to make sure they had agency partners that were at least cognizant of what was available and how to use it.
Anton:
Yeah. And look, we’re very empathetic to, I think, the marketing departments that really have legacy systems. That’s the issue you’re talking about here, where you’re dealing with legacy, it’s very hard to shift and change internally. Someone’s made a decision to go in a direction for years, maybe decades.
And as most marketers listening to this would know, there are so many options now available, it’s difficult to either bandaid or integrate into your MarTech stack solutions because just adding another layer, another layer, another layer. So, it’s definitely not easy.
But yeah, lots of nuances, lots of interesting challenges.
Darren:
And then there’s all the other sort of tech digital, everything from SEO to social media and the like, that also come into this. And they sort of sometimes get pushed into that’s a media agency or channel thing, or it’s a content creative thing, don’t they?
Anton:
Yeah. And it’s so gray. I mean, to hermetically seal that and say, “Okay, we’re just looking at SEO.” Well, that’s changed dramatically now. So, what is search these days? Do we need search? Do we need sentiment? Do we need chat? What do we actually need? And how do people search?”
So, do I need SEO in terms of capability and agency, or do I need the platform that I’m building, generally a website or owned property to be better created to serve and solve customers’ problems.
So, right back to how you started, the call center has merged with chat. So, chat online or on your website.
I’ve just been on one this morning and got so frustrated. I tried to find the phone number. I just want to call them, but I couldn’t find the phone number on their website. They’ve done a great job, I suppose an SEO expert had said, “We want call volume down, so we’ll hide the phone number so no one can find it. Bingo.”
Our stats are down in the call center in terms of calls, but my customer experience was fine. Give me the number and I’ll call and speak to someone quicker than the chatbot.
Darren:
Don’t worry, they’ll be sending you a net promoter score survey any moment now, so you can give them your feedback. Yeah, how was your experience this morning, Mr. Buchner?
Anton:
Could you call me? Zero.
Darren:
Well, actually there’s no zero. They usually do the lowest score is one, and I love it because then the comment is, I wish there was a zero here. “Why did you give us this score?” “Because there was no space for a zero.” Yeah.
Now, let’s look at the research. And the one I particularly want to focus on is pitch requirements. And what we’ve got here is pretty much if you look at creative, that was 63% of the pitches had creative or content requirements and 48% had media.
Now, people will automatically go, “Well, that’s more than a hundred percent.” But there was overlap because there was also, pictures that had both content and media.
But then after that, the next biggest group was social media and influencers. And then the third, fourth, and fifth was technology, digital and SaaS, and data CRM and loyalty.
I mean, productions down there as well, but these are quite big chunks that are making the pitch process more complex, aren’t they?
Anton:
Yeah. I mean, if I said to you, what is content these days? In the old days, it was quite simple. It was sort of email, text, and image. But what is content? Content is across everything. Of course, your web properties, social content, and all your social owned platforms and shared platforms.
So, content’s pervasive, your TBA is content, cut down onto YouTube is content, and Vimeo, et cetera. So, it’s probably not surprising to see those results as you say, not initially exclusive.
But for a client, it’s difficult to know. You can launch content, you need a content management engine, but that of course creates a data footprint.
So, then you have a data collection issue, and whether that’s collected in a walled garden or in your own system, or in the systems utilizing, and how’s that talking to the other systems?
There’s AdTech and MarTech to link into your loyalty program, for example. How’s that all intertwining?
So, I think, yeah, the more we are seeing these different disciplines, different capabilities blur, it’s not surprising that some of these big chunks are coming out as that’s what the client was looking for. That’s what market was looking for.
But what did surprise me is it’s quite traditional. It’s going the creative, the media, the content, the digital element is the biggest area they’ve started to look for.
Darren:
Yeah. And I think what we’re seeing is that they still think of paid media and then content or creative traditionally. But then as we look down that, the sort of number of capabilities starts to expand.
When you look at the numbers, around 22 of the pitches out of the 77, had 4 disciplines required. And then like 2 and 3 disciplines was 11 and 19. So, we’re talking, what’s that? 30 pitches had 2 or 3. The other 44 had 4 or more.
So, it is becoming no longer a world where you just go and get a creative agency or a media agency. And in many ways, the agencies have adapted to this. We’ve seen this explosion of capabilities within agencies, haven’t we?
Anton:
Yeah. It’s gone back to the sort of all in one agency versus the specialists as well. Again, discipline specialist. I’m not quite sure where we are now. We seem to go swings and roundabouts every 10 years.
And that thought you just had there of starting with creative and media. It’s way too generic to think like that. Of course, you might need a new media agency.
But as we all know, paid media is often the largest budget. But just one aspect of where do I go after I’ve seen a paid media ad? I clicked somewhere.
Darren:
Earned, owned, yeah.
Anton:
Owned, earned. So, thinking through what happens on that next stage of the journey. Well, I need that either current agency or the discipline of the new agency I’m looking at to be able to offer that. And as we start to see, well, that adds another agency to the roster potentially, if they’re going to that form of thought.
And then when I go through there, as I said earlier, I want to pick up the phone and talk to someone or use a chat bot depending on what I want to do. So, I need different capability there, which might be AI specialist or generative AI type specialist agencies.
So, that’s another agency into the mix or the capability, again, within the current agency.
So, just thinking through that journey, or those multiple journeys is a fair bit of our work that we’ve done over the last couple years to really get markers to think, “Okay, it’s not just a media agency and a traditional media agency. And it’s definitely not a traditional creative agency.”
And that’s, I think, why we’re saying that the agencies are bringing on more and more disciplines into their mix because it’s not easy. Everything seems to be invented and added into the mix in terms of kind offerings.
Darren:
Well, public relations is one, because your point about earned media, PR and media relations particularly, is a great way of getting that extended media exposure through earned media. And yet that was only around 8% of the pitches included a specific requirement.
Now, we’ve run PR pitches specifically for PR, and within that, needed the client to be very specific around is it media relations, government relations, investor, all the different subsections within PR.
But we’re also, seeing an increasing number of marketers coming and saying, “Yes, I’d like a creative agency that does PR, does social media influencer management, and so on and so forth.” It’s becoming like a shopping list of capabilities that are required.
Anton:
Yeah. And often that, you’re right, there’s shopping list. It’s a list ticked off versus a really sound rationale as to why we’re doing it.
I think that’s a really different question when you start going, of course, you need PR. But what do you need for your specific business?
We ran one recently. It was probably referring to as in the B2B space only. So, in B2B, completely different to consumer press. And in B2B, it was about becoming that brand or company to turn to when there are issues, all sorts of things around ESR, around utility and things that were affecting community and society.
So, who’s the company that might turn to? That CEO might be the person that needs to be on the map as a first call, as an example.
So, the role of what used to be editorial or the idea of just editorial is completely different these days. It’s who is the spokesperson? Who’s the company to talk to? Who are the influential brands, companies, leaders out there that make a splash?
And you need a specialist agency to do that. Equally with government relations to influence government, whether it’s local, state, or federal. Take specific capability.
Darren:
Well, you’ve had some very specific tenders that you’ve managed. Like I remember one where they came and basically said, “We need to rebuild our website.”
And there was this whole process of working out, “Okay, so, which particular platform are you going to build it in?” Was one of the questions because they weren’t sure, through to quite broad tenders as well, where you’ve had that full range of capabilities to be included.
Anton:
Yeah, yeah. That’s definitely not one standard. I’ll say it probably kept me young. It’s probably kept a couple of gray hairs added each year, as you’ve seen, Darren, over the decade or so I’ve worked with you.
Yeah, there’s definitely not a standard. I mean, every pitch I’ve handled I can remember has some nuance which is fascinating and certainly adds in a level of what are you actually wanting? So, there’s a whole deep dive there with the client as to what they really need.
And getting (we might come onto this a little bit later) the specific scope of work often is not clear. So, trying to identify what a really specific scope is that needs external assistance and needs the agency or agencies to help them with, that’s the whole idea, isn’t it?
We don’t do it in house, we need an agency to come and help us. So, if you can’t be clear with your agencies, how on earth can the agency be clear on the resources and what they’re delivering in a pitch situation?
And that’s interesting. Agencies tend to fall into the, we offer everything. So, they can sound very generic. And we see it time and time again, generic presentations or we do this, we do that. I mean, I’ve seen every presentation in the last six months throw AI or generative AI in as a topic and-
Darren:
Bingo.
Anton:
I talk the client to go, “It’s not bingo. It’s what specifically are you generating a need to generate? Do you want to test in that space? And if so, do you have capability to even do it on the client side?” Often that’s a no. So, you don’t need it from the agency, so agency move on.
Darren:
No, I mean, it’s the pitch bingo. As soon as the agency says AI, you go, “Right. Well, I can cross that one off.”
Anton:
Absolutely, yeah. Which is hard. It’s difficult, isn’t it? I mean, we saw this with social media back in the early 2000s. Every agency had to get on board.
So, I’m not pooh-poohing at all, please, for listeners. AI, it’s a very difficult space to navigate at the moment. But it’s pervasive and agencies are trying to test and trying to offer it to clients.
And most clients have been there, let’s get honest. They’ve been there with predictive analytics and big language models for quite a while. But there are some really sexy things coming out.
Actually, I used one the other day, an emotional AI. So, you could talk to this Hume, it’s called Hume AI. And you can talk to it, and it’ll say, “Oh, I’m not feeling too well today.” “I’m sorry, you’re not feeling too well today. Would you share what you’ve been doing?”
And so, it starts this whole emotional conversation and trying to understand the emotional sentiment behind your language. Fascinating.
Darren:
Well, and actually demonstrates quite a lot of empathy. In fact, I think it was about three years ago, I read a study that was done where they had inbound call center for complaints or for customer complaints.
And they were randomly directing one to the AI, which was programmed for empathy and the other to human beings.
And then on the exit, they were asking people to rate their experience. The AI rated off the chats for empathy, but when they said was the issue actually resolved, most of the times the AI didn’t resolve it. It was actually just listening and responding in an empathetic way.
Whereas what was happening with the human beings, they were trying to solve the problem and often ending up in conflict. So, it didn’t resolve the problem or they got a low score, but often did resolve the problem one way or the other. So, it was an interesting experiment in empathy.
I just want to go back to something you said before about lots of different pitch types and the nuances required. When you run a pitch, there are some sort of standard governance and due diligence that has to be in every pitch.
But do you find yourself having to whether it’s tweak or design the pitch process so that you pick up on the things that the client really needs to be testing?
Anton:
Yes, spot on. So, yeah, every pitch starts out with we need such and such an agency. And some clients are very clear, we have to procure an agency in Australia, for example.
So, we shouldn’t say call center because it’s called contact centers now, not call centers. They had a requirement to be in Australia, not offshore. So, sometimes they’re very, very specific.
Sometimes the pitch starts out with, “I’d like a certain type of agency. We can’t afford the globals, or we’d like to go independence for some reasoning.” That needs to be pressure tested. Why specifically?
Because there’s some great boutique global agencies and they bring lots of pros and benefits. And so, often we talk through that and really clarify if they do want to look at a couple of options sort of outside the bullseye of what they’re looking for.
Or they might say, “Look, we want a specific loyalty type of agency.” And that really opens up Pandora’s box to what is loyalty, and do you need data analytics, or do you need the tech? Do you need the creative? For the comms, what do you actually need?
But yeah, I don’t want to paint the picture if we do everything on the fly because we don’t, but very early on in the process, there’s lots of questions to help refine the process. There’s generally a process which is scan the market, find the right type of agencies, and then go through a pressure test of some sort.
Unlike the creative and media agencies, which were an, “Ah, typically let’s look at a creative problem. Let’s look at strategy, let’s look at creative executions, and compare that way.”
These are much more around what are the specifics the client wants to really understand with the agency. So, our job is not to answer any of that, just to help guide them and say, “Well, if you’re looking at that type of capability, here are the types of agencies you could be looking at.”
I think you said this earlier, I’m glad sort of digital agencies tend to be getting dropped in vernacular. As in we’re not saying they’re digital agencies anymore. We’re looking at the specific type of agency that offers digital solutions and clients.
Darren:
Well, digital is ubiquitous now. Almost everything we’re dealing with is digital in some shape or form.
Anton:
I’m hoping the digital strategy gets dropped at the next one. Still lingering. We see digital strategies, we keep reminding clients, there is only one strategy.
Darren:
Yeah. The digital aspects of the strategy.
Anton:
Of execution, yeah.
Darren:
Yeah, of the execution. Now, going back on that basis, are you surprised when, what was it, 96% of the pitches in our research had either speculative creative or a media trading exercise or both.
So, it meant that virtually, all but three had some sort of traditional spec creative where here’s a brief, come up with a creative idea. Or here’s our buying position, tell us how cheap you can buy the media. When the list of capabilities for those same pictures is quite extensive.
Anton:
Yeah, that bugged me. When I read that, I suddenly thought, “Oh, look at the disciplines here.” And having worked across most of those disciplines with marketers, it’s a murky, murky landscape. Yet just testing an agency that way, whether it’s a media or creative solution, is a terrible way to do it.
Firstly, shouldn’t be done. Secondly, and there’s completely different ways to pressure test an agency’s capability than a creative test or a media test. So, yeah, that did surprise me. Maybe a function of the type of agencies that are responding, sure.
And I think as this report grows and we keep looking for data and keep looking for responses and gets more wider and wider responses, we might see that slightly change.
But look, that’s probably a trend that’s going to stay. And that is a worry in the industry if that’s how agencies are being seen. Let’s do a creative test, let’s do a media test or decide from there. And maybe PRs chucked in, or maybe SEO is chucked in, or maybe data analytics is chucked in. It’s a bit of a dangerous way to think.
Darren:
Well, it’s interesting, even if we pick something like social media and influencer management, those are increasingly becoming technology enabled. There are now, platforms that actually rank influencers and allow you to track and monitor their contribution to a campaign, for instance.
And yet, nowhere in any of this methodology coming out of the research, does there seem to be an interrogation of that type of capability. It’s like, “Well, just do us a nice creative idea and show us your media trading and we’ll be pretty happy.”
Anton:
Yeah. And it’s almost like you drop the words into your presentation, say, “Oh, your influencers would spread the word.” And you go, “Wow. That’s a pretty light on response.”
And you know, and listeners who are in the space of paying for influencers or involved with influencers in any way, it’s absolutely a unique area that needs specialism. And there are agencies that just focus on that.
The quality of the influencer, the longevity of that influencer, how they’re getting paid, are they within the platform and being maintained within the platform.
We did one where we urged the client to look at the turnover and A, where the influencers came from, but B, the turnover on their books.
And just answering those two questions, they quickly found who was a pretty light on influencer type marketing service, versus those that have rigor and contracts and do engage their influencers to be a part of that platform that offers services to clients.
It’s a completely chalk and cheese comparison.
Darren:
I guess it makes it more difficult though, from the point of view of running your own pitch, having to be able to design it to actually focus on your specific needs.
Perhaps part of the problem is that there’s not a lot of exposure of these different approaches for different capabilities. And it could easily default to running either a creative pitch or a media pitch with a few questions on those disciplines you want as a way of hoping fingers crossed that you’re going to get the result you need.
Anton:
So, what do you think that’s a function of? Is that a function of I’m time poor, I just want to run the pitch to get a result? Is it a function of the cost the cost to run this pitch is X both in time and maybe paying, and therefore I can’t afford to do four sub components? So, I don’t know, is it time, is it money?
Reality says that pitch process could be broken down into, and we’ve seen it in the past where you break it into two or three different either stages or separate them into two different pitches or three different pitches.
Where you really are focused on, if it’s media or off you go into a media standard direction. But if it’s contact center, it’s a completely different process and group of people involved.
And if I think back to the contact center one we worked on, involved IT, involved customer service, involved the marketing team, involved quality and standards and legal because what could you say and how is that getting recorded both in the contact center and then through chat bots, et cetera.
So, yeah, different people need to be involved. Different departments need to be involved. It definitely can’t be that one size fits all. But I just wonder, mate, is it is a function of just time and time and money, that it’s easier to do one?
Darren:
I think that’s definitely the case. That there’s not enough time. And, “Look, I’ve run a pitch before and it was done this way. So, that’s the way it should be done,” is the first thing.
I think the other thing that we saw, particularly this century let’s say, is that as these new disciplines arose … you pointed out social media sort of suddenly sprung up in what, around 2004, ‘5, ‘6?
Anton:
‘4, ‘5, ‘6, yeah.
Darren:
Yeah. Around that time, because it was so new, often agencies would get appointed without a pitch. There wasn’t a process of actually running a tender. You would just, oh, well, I’ll get them in and try them out.
Then over time it became more ubiquitous and suddenly there’s lots of people. So, now, we’re running a pitch.
Except by that stage, all of the agencies that you traditionally thought as creative agencies were also, offering those services. So, I’ll just run a creative pitch and hope that they can manage that well.
I think there is this evolution that happens with all technology, to your point before about AI. And I think the big thing that we have to acknowledge here is it’s really generative AI that’s got everyone excited.
Because in many ways AI has been around, machine learning’s been around for years and been applied in the data space for at least a decade if not more.
But it’s this generative AI of being able to make images, and videos, and reproduce music, and voice and things like that, that’s got people excited because so much of the marketing budget, so much of the implementation budget is spent in that space.
And I think that’s why people are excited about it and focused on it because they see it potentially has a big impact.
But what it doesn’t do is actually test. If you’re going to a creative pitch, are we going to stop doing speculative creative? Unless you put the brief into an AI and it comes up with a campaign. And then it’s going to be who has the best AI algorithm?
Anton:
Yeah. Which is based on historical events anyway. So, it’s probably recreating a wheel that’s already been created.
But that’s hard in itself, isn’t it, to judge in such a new space? And if procurement is doing it, and we’ve seen procurement not necessarily aligned to marketing, is procurement assessing, in this case AI or the services of agencies and have they got the skillset or not the skillset to do that? Or have they done it a different way?
I think you’re right. I think that the default back to I’ve run a pitch a certain way, or this is the way I’ve been involved in pitches before, therefore it must be the way forward.
I’d love to dispel that or crack that completely open, because it’s completely not the way to run a pitch these days. And to think differently about it. Why you’re doing it, what resources, what capabilities, how tech is helping, not helping.
And I loved one of the statements here, I think on the opening page of the report which I think opens up another challenge.
Where it talks about the expectation from, I assume the client side here, procurement or marketing, of doing full annual strategy including our approach to corporate technology transformation and broader business strategies, portfolio strategies as a requested agency.
Darren:
That’s tied to a pitch.
Anton:
And you go, “Okay, so, we need an agency to solve our complete business problem, landscape operation. Oh, and a bit of marketing.”
I mean, if I read that correctly, I’m not sure what the pitch was or who it was for, but the expectation may be from procurement or client side that an agency is going to solve everything is a misnomer as well.
Agencies won’t be able to solve everything. Only as good as how the client’s going to give them information or give them territory to work in as we know. So, maybe expectations have got too big.
Darren:
Think about how many of the big consulting firms, if you said, “We’d like you to tender for our business, we want you to solve this massive business problem for us. Oh, by the way, we’ll only pay you if you’re successful.” I don’t think they’d get a lot of people actually pitching for it, do you?
Anton:
No, no.
Darren:
I think that’s the big difference.
But you’re right. I mean, marketing, the technology that’s happened in the past 20, 30 years has fundamentally made marketing more complex in consideration. And yet we still using a pitch process that was the way it was done when I was working as a copywriter in advertising 30 years ago. It’s just crazy.
Anton:
Yeah. I was talking to one of the major tech vendors last week, and they were talking about a client that wanted 40,000 variants in the segmentation. And they quite rightly questioned and said, “Why on earth do you need 40,000? And what do you ultimately need to do?”
And so, to hear the tech vendor pushing back against clients and not just selling in the tech to go, “Actually, is it postcode driven? Was it geographically driven? What was actually needed that was not a 40,000 target audience sell type approach?”
So, yeah, look, I think technology has been shiny. It’s been shiny for a long time. It’s taken a lot of people off what the real game is. Business hasn’t changed.
Darren:
No.
Anton:
Get people to know about your product or service or brand, get them interested, get them paid, and then keep them loyal. Yeah, nothing’s really changed in that, but the technology’s dragged us a little bit off into shiny land.
And then of course, testing land. AI is fantastic. Test it and prove it’s beaten the benchmark. Fantastic. And apply it and use it more.
But I remember one, we had a great lead up to a pitch where they were talking in digital media only. So, of digital media, could you look at our … what they were saying was a market mix model.
But they were the first conundrum. Well, we’re looking at media only and you’re applying a market mix model, end up being a media mix model.
And then when I looked at the report, the first asterisk was data utilized for this was only through to lead and applications only. So, there was no sales data, there was no confirmation whether anyone had actually gone from lead to sale.
And so, there’s a massive spend that in a model that may not be most relevant because it’s chats, digital bots that have gone through the leads and maybe no one converted, who knows? But it’s, I guess, unpicking what you actually need.
And in their case, they need a sales data, need to carry it through to sales. But that was a different department.
Darren:
Yeah. Look, Anton time’s flown by and we’ve run out. Thank you for coming along and discussing this. I think it’s going to be fascinating how in the next few years we see the requirements of pitching change, but particularly the process. So, thanks for sharing your thoughts today.
Anton:
Pleasure. And I’d love to hear from anyone listening, drop us a message how have requirements changed and what are they seeing in terms of the challenge in finding the right requirements for marketing needs or across the business needs. Let’s keep the conversation going. Thanks, Darren.
Darren:
Great idea. And for those that are listening, you can download the research report, State of the Pitch in Australia on the TrinityP3 website, trinityp3.com/state-of-the-pitch with hyphens between each of those. Thanks for listening.