SACRIFICING THE PRAWN

3 AGENCIES AND THE DILEMMA OF A RIGGED PITCH.

“Assholes.” I was looking for a better word, but can’t quite find one without the overuse of supporting adjectives or some truly offensive words. Of course, if you are one of the people I’m describing or just enjoy colorful language, do keep reading, especially if you’re a fan of throwing in some “filler” in pitches to make your corporate quota for “competitive bidding.”

If you’re an agency, you’ve been fodder for it. If you’re a client, you’ve done it, and if you’re an agency person, you might have even lost your job due to its overuse and, in some cases, overabuse as round after round of revisions are requested even as there’s no intention of awarding the job.

Three bids. Three ideas. And a clear preference for who they already want to give the business to. Sure, there are rules, but if you’re stacking the deck at the expense of others, you’ve not only wasted time and damaged lives, you’re damaging the reputation of your company.

Lost pitches cost marketing agencies hundreds of millions of dollars per year and bankrupt one after another — some of it actually with good intentions, but sometimes it’s just some unthinking little prick with “friends.”

Agencies spend up to 17% of their revenue to cover the non-billable hours spent annually on pitching. — Forrester

In China, our usual number of participating agencies was around seven, and we might go three or more rounds to even get to a point of being “awarded it,” and still might go through months of research, development, budgets, and revisions before even getting a signed contract. And China isn’t the only one, although the number of agencies does vary and in some cases goes down to a reasonable three. And like the piss these clients are taking, it trickles down the agency leg to vendors, freelancers, and others who are also wasting time and money right along with the agencies.

83% of global purchase influencers expressed dissatisfaction in one or more areas with a vendor they worked with. — 4A’s

The success of an idea, direction, result, and even the agency itself hinges on the client’s capabilities. Their organizational skills, clear direction, and deep understanding of their brand’s goals are crucial. They should also possess a basic understanding of processes, timelines, and reasonable expectations. A good client can elevate work to greatness, while an inexperienced one can drain resources and cost money. Ultimately, the best clients excel at their core role: being clients.

Recently, a large American multinational known for its adherence to decency, process, and fairness, decided to throw out a brief to creative shops. The HQ of this company is known for its squeaky-clean image, and having worked with them over the years, I can attest to its reality. But once they go abroad, things can change. Once they’re just enough timezones away, ethics can be lost in transit — they’re much freer to abuse agencies for multiple rounds and complete pitch decks that require a shop to do hundreds of hours of work.

Now imagine the situation where the work and plan are competitive, even better than that of the competition, and their previous work is shared to “set the bar.” What if this is the case, and then this agency finds out that they’ve actually been “disqualified”? So, despite invitations for pitches for multiple projects and promises of a win (from clients), they find out through other channels they never had a chance — and it’s good that these “other channels” exist because, as is the case for pitching individual jobs, there is no face-to-face presentation, so nobody from the client side was going to come clean.What this one example amounts to is a global system being abused by local clients who either don’t understand its use or never properly embraced the midwestern (US) values that the company set in place.

In other cases, even as an agency managed to outlast and outperform, as they were brought in to lose, while they win in every way, some lame excuse comes in after two months and obvious success. There are certainly client concerns in bringing in new agencies, especially when the incumbent has been a part of their process and development over many years. However, an invitation to five agencies to bring in in-depth thinking that can amount to multiple hundreds of pages, budgets, and planning, only to be narrowed to four and another complete revision/rethinking, then finally make it to a final round only to be told that the client is just more comfortable with the people that they already had, leaves us all wondering both why bother and why we would ever be a fan of the client’s product ever again.

“Power promotes feelings of entitlement and powerholders are not often cognizant of their violation of basic fairness principles.” — Tobore Onojighofia Tobore

Now, I’m not saying anything new. A quick search reveals countless articles on this bullshit, offering advice on how to combat the abuse and the various ways it manifests. It’s honestly all fucking useless because many of these fuckers think they’re doing the agency a favor just to be invited to brush up against the brand’s overpriced salve, technological genius, or sparkling uselessness. They’re the people that invite you to dinner, where you end up doing the dishes, not getting fed, and fucked in the back alley, which then has the abusers telling everyone what a bad “lay” you were. I see you and your DNA, and it ain’t the world’s famous chili that you’ve missed out on exporting.

The Honest Answers?

The honest answers, at least the closest ones to exist, are where advertising and marketing organizations have enlisted clients to sign on for codes of conduct — The French and European advertising codes of conduct are designed to promote ethical practices and ensure fair competition. The key code of conduct in France is the ARPP (Autorité de Régulation Professionnelle de la Publicité). There are organizations in the US, China, and Singapore that claim to enforce standards, but nobody is actually holding clients to account for all their hijinx. If there were any justice in the world, we’d call some of this behavior what it actually is: fraud and possibly theft. Maybe we need to call these fuckers out by name and rate them publicly — I doubt anybody is going to care much about a body-positive campaign when they find out the levels of abuse that go on behind the scenes.

Client Conundrum vs. Agency Reality

I understand the client conundrum. For a long-ass time, marketing has been all smoke and mirrors as the big holding companies try to increase profits while cutting costs and make as much money as possible from clients in some pretty dubious ways. Of course, a lot of that is in the past as accountability for every little item is much more easily tracked. But while this might have been the case, we’re now in a hangover where one side is more transparent than the other, and many of the children running things on the client side, especially in some categories, have been left to their own devices, and nobody has bothered to teach them the basics or scold them for, basically, anything.

A 2019 report by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) estimated that “The bottom line is that each pitch, on average, requires $44,000 of non-billed agency hours. That is shocking enough, considering most advertisers either do not pay a pitch fee, or if they do, it is much less than $44,000.” — Brent Smart, CMO at IAG

With this pitch proliferation where the real “ringers” are those who are guaranteed to take the “dive,” there’s the danger of different types of abuse. There’s no real choice but to stay in the perpetual game of cat and mouse of hidden billing and costs for agencies asked to play the fixed game. You see, if you’re in the “friend zone,” and even getting to second base makes you a loser, taking a few liberties to stay alive might be the only option — the back in China 15% chance of winning (all things equal) makes no financial sense, and your chances might just be the same within a group of three where your shop has been called in just to make purchasing happy. Once you finally get a win, the temptation may be to hide some costs, stab some backs, and fuck just about everyone you’re supposed to be partnering with — in Zombieland, it becomes kill or be killed. Nobody really thinks this is a game or a fight, or even that it should be. Some of us are just out there trying to communicate, sell some shit, and help your image along the way — it’s getting harder to make you look good when some of you are behaving like absolute dolts.

Redefining Victory

The unpredictable nature of the three-body problem is an apt metaphor for the chaos and complexity of the business world. Just like in physics, where predicting the motion of three celestial bodies interacting with each other is notoriously difficult, navigating professional setbacks and client dynamics can feel equally impossible. Yet, through this chaos, we find our strength and resilience.

We may lose pitches, face unethical practices, and deal with clients who treat us like expendable commodities, but each loss is a stepping stone. Each setback teaches us to adapt, improvise, and grow stronger as a team. We learn to play the long game, to value our integrity and creativity over short-term wins. Because in the end, the true measure of success is not just about winning the next pitch, but about building a reputation and a team that can face any challenge head-on, knowing that nobody can fuck with us. We’re in this for the long haul, navigating the three-body problem of our professional lives with grit, humor, and a never-say-die attitude.

The Waiting

I’m a fuck up by some standards. I’ve made some decisions based on need and not want, and there’s a reason my freelance gig is called “Bureau of Bad Decisions” — pretty much tells the story of not just much of my category experience, but a bit of the rest. The thing about making some moves based on happenstance and moving with the word “yes” at the tip of your tongue, is that you end up in some interesting places, meet some interesting people, and come away with the type of education that normal people don’t get. And this is why losing can sometimes be good.

While we were waiting for the client decision on this 10-day non-stop, no-breaks, 16-hours-a-day spectacle, we had some previously scheduled training for the creative teams. There’s a real desire for the creative team to get out front and present more. As this is the sort of thing that every agency asks, and rightly so, I didn’t see value in teaching people how to stand up and talk in a room. I saw how we think and how fast we’re able to change gears. I saw the dynamic and not the diction. I called in improv trainers because while a little bit shy, the problem with creatives isn’t about knowing, it’s about confidence and learning to give-no-fucks about who’s watching. The result was interesting.

The intense nature of pitches can lead to significant psychological impacts on agency staff. A survey by the UK’s National Advertising Benevolent Society (NABS) found that 64% of advertising professionals have considered leaving the industry due to poor mental health, with pitches cited as a major stressor — Bridgen, E. (2022). Pitch imperfect: power relations and ceremonial values in the public relations pitching process.

The result was interesting not because it was surprising, but because it was an awakening for members of the team to the reality that what we do and what we’d been doing during the pitch was Improv: we’d been doing the “yes and” as we collaborated, responding to each other, covering for each other, and finishing each other’s ideas like a professional troupe. Sure, we weren’t on stage, but our work was, and the polish showed. And as we walked away from the sessions, learning something about ourselves that we already knew, we knew that when one of us starts something, it’s the rest that will finish it. Because the best creative groups learn how to work as a troupe, a squad, a team, and sometimes a gang. The bad news was coming, but the good news was that in our hearts we know that nobody can fuck with us. We’re playing at a level well above losers and know it.

The End.

This was a client that gave an unknown or barely known agency a chance. Sure, the chance was a slim one and it was against strong competition. There were global powerhouses, talented others and an incumbent who might have been the right choice no matter what — not because they were better, but because time was short, they were a known entity and having confidence, is kind of a thing. Yes. The fix may have been in, but if it was, they did things honourably and nobody felt dirty or used in the end.

Nobody wants to feel like a shill and it’s demoralizing to come in 2nd or 3rd or even 4th. But when you were asked to play a game, but with a set of rules that say you’ve already lost, it’s just bullshit.