This article first appeared in AdNews in print. Click here to subscribe to the AdNews magazine or read the iPad edition here.
When Heinz’s pan-European creative account went to pitch in September, adland was not particularly happy. Heinz’s three-month payment terms and plans to disengage production from creative were followed by an e-auction element “to capture rate information”.
Many agencies pulled out. Ultimately BBH won, but Heinz’s attitude is still irking many. “The commercial terms for the agency pitch are clear and if agencies were not comfortable with them they wouldn’t be excited about pitching for such an iconic and much-loved brand”, was the response from Heinz Group’s European director of corporate and government
affairs, Nigel Dickie.
We ask, how would you make pitching better?...
Pitching often feels like a blind date. You turn up in your glad rags, with your heart on your sleeve and your soul bared. You attempt to sell your wares for about two hours, with your most intelligent dialogue and wittiest retorts, often to a room of poker faces who promise to call in two weeks. Then you sit expectantly by the phone (they rarely call in two weeks) and if you’re lucky, a relationship ensues.
All too often, this process also involves taking the brief with little or no client contact and literally producing a year's worth of ‘fully finished’ work in less than a month. It’s a crazy way to operate. There is a better way and it’s all about collaboration and chemistry. Seeing as it’s a relationship we are looking to enter into, why not spend the majority of the time getting to know each other? Talk and talk some more, ask lots of questions and do your homework on their business problems. Then go to them with conceptual scamps that demonstrate your thinking. After all, that’s what they’re paying us for. They want to see how our thinking can help their brand. And working in this nimble fashion means you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. They don’t need to love everything you show them, as long as enough of it gets them enthused and engaged. We recently pitched this way and it was so refreshing. The client appreciated the depth and breadth of ideas. They were genuinely excited by what they saw and I think both parties felt the chemistry was right. We’re still sitting by the phone. But if we’re lucky enough to get that call, I just know the relationship will start on the right foot.
“Stop bitching, start pitching” is Martin Kellard’s and Ian Elliot’s guide to the remarkable new business success they engineered during their time at George Patts. The title reverberates inside my brain, as I wonder how this forum won’t degenerate into a full-on bitch session. I mean, some of the stories you hear are truly awful Which is why I’ve decided to relate a fantastic pitch experience.
This is a current story and the names have been changed (except for ours of course) as a matter of courtesy. We were invited into a threeway pitch for an insurance brand that was part of a large financial institution’s portfolio. The pitch was organised and led by the person who was going to be the client on an ongoing basis. His first step was to personally interview 10 agencies from which he then selected a short list of three. He gave each of the selected agencies a payment of $5,000 for their efforts. We were asked to solve a specific online issue he outlined, even though the entire business was on review – he felt the bigger picture project would require a degree of collaboration beyond what a pitch would allow. We were evaluated against the same criteria and the score sheets were subsequently distributed among the agencies for review. Each of them did well strategically, technically and creatively. It was the final component of the assessment where we put our nose in front.
His answer as to why this was the case was the best of compliments: “I just thought I could work well with you guys.” Yes, it happens.
Pitches are a bit like childbirth … Long, arduous, sleep-deprived, cursing at your partner, wondering how everybody else does it … messy. No one is ever particularly satisfied with the process. But the outcome can be glorious.
“It wasn’t a fair process” is a term mainly used by the losers. But what is fair, and fair for whom?
For me, the fairest pitches are those where the rules of play, including deliverables, timings and assessment criteria, don’t change. Each agency can then assess if they want to be ‘in’ or ‘out’ from the very beginning.
But even the best pitch briefs are often interpreted differently by each side. And this is where dialogue becomes critical and so it should - a key criterion for any client considering an agency should be the ability to establish a strong line of communication from the very beginning. Pitch consultants can be brilliant, not only in ensuring the initial brief is correct (i.e. doesn’t change throughout the process), but also in facilitating fair dialogue and taking the heat of out painful remuneration discussions. And even when all of this is established, maybe there is space to embrace an element of unfairness.
Is creative subjectivity fair? Is it fair to like the team at one agency,\ even if their remuneration is slightly higher? It’s these intangibles that drive us to think harder, be more creative, care more about the client’s business, to carve out
unique identities as agencies. To be the best that we can be.
You can tell a lot about a client by the way they run a pitch. I once had a client who refused to give us a brief because if we cared about his business we’d know what the brief was. Another client paid a small pitch fee, which was nice, until we realised it was so they could own the IP of everything that was presented. The feckers are still using our endline.
But at least they both had a distinct agenda and some imagination. And I can handle the wins and losses and that procurement guy who looks like it’s all he can do to stop himself leaping over the desk and stabbing me in the face with a fork before I’ve even hit slide four, if the process has some clear focus and spark about it.
So let’s cut to the chase. As a client, what do you really need to know to make your decision? I can’t imagine it’s particularly fun or illuminating sitting through endless hours of agencies trying to cover all bases and secondguess a year’s worth of work in the artificial environment of a pitch.
Narrow it right down. Tell us all the things you don’t need to know. Set a single, novel task. Ban slides. Challenge us on things other than rates and how we can put together a 200 page PowerPoint presentation in two weeks with minimal consultation. You’ll get so much more out of agencies.
Imagine how much you could learn about an agency from a first round chat about business over dinner and karaoke.
Just a thought.
BMF deals with a range of processes when pitching for work - some procurement-led, others run by marketers and pitch consultants. Whoever is leading the process, the best pitches are transparent, collaborative, and run to a clear time frame, and the ones where all contenders are treated equally and respectfully.
The worst pitch processes are quite the opposite and BMF tends to steer clear of these ‘opportunities’.
What do we do to make pitching better (fairer, less expensive, friendlier…)? ‘Fair’ is a relative term – as long as all parties are treated the same throughout a process, I’d consider that fair, coupled with complete transparency of the process, timing, scope, deliverables, size of opportunity and the number of players in the running.
Knowledge is power and, if you know all these things, you’re able to make an informed decision about whether to participate.
At BMF, we don’t enter into pitches unless we genuinely like the client team we’re working with and there’s a clear alignment on values, culture and objectives.
We don’t tolerate unfriendliness or a protracted procurement-led process where we're kept at arm’s length from the marketing team. The more that type of process is tolerated, the more that process will flourish.
This article first appeared in AdNews in print. Click here to subscribe to the AdNews magazine or read the iPad edition here.
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