The Muddy Pitch
In this weeks NMA the “UK’s top creative agencies” (click here to view full story) have called for changes to agency/client relationships in a bid to cut wastage on expensive (digital) pitches.
They make some sensible suggestions about how the process can be managed more cost-effectively and, as ever, this perennial problem will fall upon deaf ears and nothing will change.
Apparently, they say with a little menace, the problems with the pitch process are forcing these agencies to “become more selective about the clients to which they pitch”.
All of this is right and valid in it’s own bubble, but actually all of it is wrong. It misses the point. It’s not about clients, it’s not about agencies its about how the technology has changed the pitch process. More than that, its about how technology has changed the agency / client relationship. We give a talk in one of our learning lunches called “Why does a 2 minute change take 2 hours and a 2 hour change take two minutes?.” There are two points to that story. Firstly the lack of technical understanding and the implications of making a “change.” Secondly, the dynamics of the medium.
The first point is hopefully fairly self-explanatory, but anyway that’s for another day. It’s the second point that needs our attention. The agency model, call it what you like, was created decades ago for the delivery of advertising and marketing in a broadly print medium. The sexy bit about being in the agency world is the big idea, the thrill of the pitch the heart-stopping moment when you first real the creative. At times that is still utterly appropriate. At others, as the article points out, trust should get a lower-margin digital project over the start line. But how do we create that trust?
Back in agency-land, when the real project is underway it’s all about the account teams earning their fees, trying to be seen to add value to their client side counterparts. Creating the circumstances through fair means of foul in which those clients will open their wallets again. That end-result doesn’t have to change, but the way we do it does.
A number of the contributors to the NMA article talk about partnership and collaboration but that’s just same-old glib management speak unless you realise the true essence of it. In order to make it work is to knock down the mirrors and clear the smoke that the agencies have themselves put up, either because they haven’t actually got the correct capabilities in-house, or they didn’t understand the question in the first place.
The only to successfully work with technology in a consumer communications environment is for clients and agencies to share knowledge and educate each other everyday throughout the process not at the fortnightly big show and reveal meeting. They need to get off their high-horses, knock the fence down and parley. It means explaining why something takes 2 hours not 2 minutes before the work is started, not when the bill is submitted. It means the clients trusting the agencies as the experts and not beating them up over the fee for the change. Work can and should be shown “in-progress” online or in person before it is too late. Many changes can be made in 2 minutes that will fundamentally improve a piece of work, but the further it goes into development the more potential for trouble there is.
And what that takes is knowledge, good management and the right skills with which to deliver. Without it trust, and in case I haven’t made it enough already that is the point, will never be created.
Again in the article one of the contributors said “What we’ve found is that many clients have a champagne palate and a ginger beer pocket”. That’s as maybe, but without explaining what and why you trying to sell up front – by people who know what they are talking about, we just go right back to where we started. The pitch process.
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