The pitch process kills client chemistry and needs to be reevaluated
There’s no better time to reexamine a process that’s already had to change to a COVID climate, argues co-founder and digital experience director at UnDigital, Andrew Cornale.
The pitch process is due for a serious spruce up.
To be blunt, online pitches are where chemistry goes to die. Think you might have something special to share? Throw in a bad internet connection, laggy video plus people who don’t know how to use Zoom, and now all you’ve got is a disjointed meeting filled with disinterested people. Agencies might genuinely have something special and exciting to share with the client, but the standard pitch process is just draining and ineffective. From the long-winded briefs that are somehow still vague to the 100 page PDF you send off without much hope, the process simply strips good ideas of what makes them so great. This process really needs to be reevaluated.
Exciting ideas deserve to be delivered in exciting ways
The biggest issue with the pitch process is its relentlessly boring nature. All too often, briefs are given in long-winded documents and a ‘solution’ to the client’s problem has already been outlined. For the agency at the other end, the pitch response becomes a document whereby they’re just proving they’re capable of ticking certain boxes. It completely lacks creativity and leaves no room for the agency to recommend a different, and perhaps better, solution.
