Pitch Imperfect
The following letter was published in full in the trade magazine “Campaign” on 12th November 2009 and is intended to provide insight and leadership in this hot topic area:
“2009 will leave many people in the media agency world bruised, scarred, exhausted and quite possibly downhearted. No year in living memory has witnessed such a plunge in ad spend levels. No year this decade has witnessed so many account reviews.
MediaSense is of course an active participant in change processes, but we feel an obligation and responsibility to express our concerns about the worrying trends we are observing in the media industry, which, if unchecked, will threaten its long-term health.
Bad pitch processes tend to fall into one of two categories : the poorly-organised and the cost-obsessed. (Some combine both.) Poor preparation is a serious mistake, which no process properly recovers from and can fracture old and new relationships. An excessive focus on cost not only undermines the client/agency relationship, but also the agency/media owner relationship.
Most process problems (eg. over-long timetables, process flip-flopping) can be anticipated and overcome with sufficient thinking and resourcing before the event, but it is evident in your article (23/10) on recent media reviews that several clients are insufficiently preparing/prepared for such rigorous processes.
There is also a small but growing band of clients which are putting cost savings at the centre of their process. This is inevitable in these economic times, and justified as long as the process is robust and consistent with this objective. But here again, the numerous tales of short-cutting and bad maths are indicative of poorly planned and managed processes.
The use of grids and spreadsheets to evaluate and compare buying ability is a practice which can completely dislocate performance from client objectives. If carried out in isolation, this woefully oversimplifies the negotiation process. Having selected a “winner”, everyone then scratches their heads questioning how these commitments can be put into the contract ! Worse still is the auctioning of buying rates to select the best “supplier”, which relegates the craft of media buying to the sport of online gambling.
Clients taking such cost-centric approaches risk eventually becoming commoditized themselves, as the inevitable quid pro quo is to accept undesired inventory and highly restrictive trading caveats. Many of these clients will still be buying rating points by the yard when their competitors have moved on to engage with their customers in far deeper and more profitable ways.
Agencies which are prepared to win business at any cost are also on the road to self-commoditization. By constantly shuffling their pack and dealing low cards to the media owners they are frittering their reputations away. Their client relationships will tend to become more brittle, loyal clients becoming fed up with subsidizing new business gains,.
There is another key player in the pitch process – the third party advisors. The style, content and outcome of any pitch process is very heavily influenced by the kind of company hired for the job. It is infuriating to see such ‘advisors’ actively encouraging agency churn, attempting to take the moral and trust high ground in this area, without taking any responsibility for the outcomes.
Proper pitch management involves setting out rules and boundaries at the start. It involves briefing clearly and transparently on expected outcomes and results. It involves a lot of planning and preparation, not recycled spreadsheets and template briefs. Some advisors however are clearly motivated to use the pitch process as a cross-selling exercise, or to exploit grid-filling tasks as a means of populating their own data pools.
Pitch management requires integrity but risks being commoditized itself by the actions of individuals and organizations which should know better.
So what’s the solution? A more ethical, responsible and mature approach is required from all parties.
Here are some suggestions for raising the bar of pitch management processes in 2010
1. Treat the cost of media as essential hygiene and put it in a box as quickly as possible.
2. Use auctions only to achieve transparency, not to encourage over-promising.
3. Brief consistently, thoroughly efficiently and specifically.
4. Ensure the process steering group provides good governance by providing regular internal and external communications to all stakeholder groups.
5. Don’t leave it late – a good process takes time: leaving it to the last quarter is very risky and clients who do so rarely achieve the desired result.