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I’ll bet there are days you want to fire your agency right then and there. Missed a deadline, the creative presentation was crap, you feel neglected by the agency’s senior staff. Whatever the reason, right this second you want to go all Donald Trump on them and fire them.
When these times happen, and they will, please count to ten.
Because if you only get to eight and your inner Trump comes out, that means you have to find another agency. Sounds easy, right? There are countless hungry agencies out there who would just die to work on your brand. While that is undoubtedly true, I can tell you from my near-decade in the pitching business on the agency side (first at Arnold Worldwide and now with my own pitch consultancy for agencies), that agencies can smell pitches launched with the wrong intentions, or pitches run without being properly thought through.
But agency reactions aside, pitches are enormously expensive and can take months to complete. Not to mention the fact that with each pitch, fantastic talent at agencies around the country are ignoring their existing clients in order to pitch your business. Sounds great until you realize they will be doing that for countless unnecessary pitches and ignoring you someday.
Let's just say there's a “higher good” at play here.
So, I beg you to consider these four questions the next time you have a negative experience with your agency.
One, are you doing a pitch for the right reasons?
In my example above, I describe several agency issues that you may conclude are grounds for malpractice. Fine. Tough to argue with you there. But, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the receiving end of a pitch where the final result seemed fixed from the beginning. As a hypothetical, though typical, example, a new CMO is hired. One who has worked with, say, Wieden & Kennedy or some such famous agency, twice before at different companies. After a “sensible” 3-6 months getting settled, understanding the brand and its challenges, and having several interactions with the current agency first-hand, this new CMO suddenly puts the business into review. And, look, Wieden & Kennedy is invited. Fancy that.
The CMO proceeds to go through the motions of a gigantic pitch, involving thousands of people’s lives from 20-30 different agencies, the pitch consultants, and his or her own staff. And then, in the end, after all the RFPs, the capabilities meetings, the strategic work sessions, the creative work sessions and the final presentations, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent out-of-pocket by each agency, you end up hiring...Wieden & Kennedy.
Pretty elaborate cover for a foregone conclusion.
I mean, I understand why you go through these motions. You’re the new person, you want to at least appear as though you’re properly vetting the next agency choice, and, perhaps in the back of your mind, you want to make sure that W&K is right. But the collective price paid for such a move must be at least considered before pulling the pitch trigger.
Now, for a certain few of the "image conscious" marketing leaders whose appearances are important to project as “change agents” making big agency moves, consider this. You will look like a far more respectable marketer if you are able to take an existing agency to new heights than to simply replace an old agency with a new one. The former is evidence of truly inspirational leadership, the latter only an ability to outsource problems.
So, in the pretend scenario above, either skip the pitch and just hire Wieden & Kennedy (no one ever got fired hiring them), or hold a truly competitive pitch, where anyone can win.
Two, are you inviting the incumbent to defend? Don’t.
If you are set on finding a new agency, please don’t placate the current agency by inviting them to retain the business. I know, I know, sometimes the incumbent wins. But it’s so rare that it’s cruel to invite them (less than 5% of incumbents win according to Avi Dan in his insightful article about the Mini pitch). Even if the incumbent has been the agency for ten years and you feel like you at least “owe” them a shot at retaining the business, don’t do it. If you owe them anything, you owe them a chance to publicly bow out and save face.
Because here’s the incumbent’s no-win thought-process once they get the phone call from you that the business is in review:
The business is in review. Damn. We need to retain this business. We need to go all out, all hands on deck, every stone unturned, money is no object. The entire agency must be mobilized behind this single goal!
And that agency will, in fact, try everything to retain your business. But, sadly, in trying everything, particularly if they perform unexpectedly well, they will force you to ask a question that will shoot them dead (with the light of the projector still in their eyes): "Why didn’t you do all this great work before we put the business into review?" It’s just a no-win situation, and that uncomfortable moment will happen, trust me.
Further, if you rightly decide not to include the incumbent in the pitch from the beginning, the added pressure of that decision, due to the knowledge that you are truly going to end up with a new agency now, will likely mean fewer unnecessary pitches in the world.
Three, are you using a pitch consultant? Good.
As an agency pitch guy myself, I loved and hated the review consultants at the same time. That's the normal course of the universe. But for you, good pitch consultants add incredible efficiency to the pitch process. There are thousands of agencies out there, for starters. A good pitch consultant is in constant touch with the best agencies and has a good sense as to what these agencies are good at (and not good at). So the consultant can get you a short list of 20-25 agencies pretty quickly, based on your own selection criteria, to start the process. Then they can manage those 20-25 agencies through the entire process so you don’t have to. An incredibly valuable service if you want to spend any time actually doing your job during the 3-4 month pitch.
But be sure to interview several pitch consultants and evaluate their respective processes. They all have different philosophies, levels of involvement, and pricing. Find the one that will help you truly see how an agency works, even if it means bending the consultant’s rules a bit to fit your style. The agency decision is too important to sacrifice having a good, intimate feel for the agency you’re about to hire.
Four, are you shopping for "the idea" or an agency partner?
I've noticed a shift from clients looking for "agency partners, regardless of the idea” to clients looking for “the idea, regardless of the agency.” Ten-twenty years ago, the pitch, the strategy, the creative, the presentations, all of it, were there to test the mettle of a potential agency partner. The pitch process was designed to see how the agencies think, with less emphasis on what the agencies think. You could win with the wrong work back then, if you impressed the client with how you approached the problem (and they liked you).
But more recently it seems clients don’t have the luxury of finding a “partner” anymore. They need a new campaign idea, and they need it now (with spots produced by the sales meeting in June).
This decision - whether you need a partner or the idea - matters when it comes to the decision to hold a pitch or not. If you want a partner, and value a lasting relationship with an agency, then the traditional pitch process is the best way to find that partner. It’s not perfect, but it’s a solid way to see how lots of agencies think. But, if you want the next big campaign, there is a far quicker, cheaper, and, dare I say, more humane, way to go.
And it involves your current agency.
If you're unhappy with the work you're getting, put the pressure on your agency. Not in the intimidating and embarrassing context of a public pitch, but in a way that tells them you still love them, and maybe even motivates them. Tell them you want them to give them a chance to disrupt their normal approach to come up with the new idea.
Couple ways to do that:
- Ask for a new internal agency team. Each agency is filled with teams who work on various pieces of business. You have one team working on your business now and, for whatever reason, they're not getting it done. So ask your agency leaders to put new, fresh talent on your new fresh creative brief. Tell these leaders you want it to be like a pitch, run in parallel to the day-to-day workings of your existing team. If you think that will offend your current team, you’re right. But it’s a far cry from putting the agency into a review and inviting them to participate (which, as I said, is cruel).
- Go outside from the inside. Give your agency permission, and incremental budget, to go outside for fresh perspective. There are literally hundreds of incredibly talented creative directors out there who could turn your brand upside down, if your agency asked them to: Ernie Schenck, Jed Alger, Kathy Hepinstall, Tim Hanrahan, Amee Shah, Tim Roper, and so many others. Tell your agency you expect them to continue to serve as the creative directors over these hired guns, that you don’t want to see any work that they don’t love first. But get the hired guns in there. Another way to do this is to push your agencies towards crowdsourcing solutions (e.g. Victors & Spoils) or, if I may, my own "expert sourcing" solution, Ideasicle, for outside perspective. But the point is, don’t fire the agency, give them permission to augment their roster, as necessary. It’ll prove that you trust your agency and that you truly see them as a valuable partner.
Sometimes a pitch is the right thing to do. But often it's not. And it's not fair to you, or to your agency partner, to simply press the "Pitch" button whenever the idea isn't quite right. If you answer the above four questions honestly, I think you'll know when to pitch and when to leave the pitch unpitched.
Postscript: my motivations.
You may be questioning my motivations here. I’m a pitch guy, yet I’m encouraging you not to hold a pitch, if you don’t have to. Here’s why. If I can eliminate even one unnecessary, politically-motivated pitch, a pitch neither I nor the other 19 agencies can possibly win no matter how great our pitches are, then I am doing a great service to my odds of winning the next pitch, and a great service to the ad world in general.
