Life's a Pitch 

A marketing manager dies, and gets to the pearly gates of Heaven. Upon arrival, he's presented with a special offer to try both Heaven and Hell in order to choose which one he likes best. His inspection of Heaven goes fine. It's a nice place, full of pleasant people.

His visit to Hell, on the other hand, is amazing. Rather than being confronted by pitchfork-wielding devils and cauldrons of fire, he opens the door to Hell and stumbles into the equivalent of the best VIP Lounge in the world. Great food, drinks and a nonstop party are on offer, and he has the best time he can remember.

Upon his return to the Pearly Gates, he decides that Hell would be the best place for him. When he returns to Hell, he rushes to open the door and rejoin and instead finds himself confronted with the Hell he originally imagined - fire, pitchforks, and the lot. He then runs up to the devil and angrily demands to know what's going on here - how he was promised the best party of his life, only to find the reality to be very different and far less rosy.

The devil responds, with a wry smile on his face "Last week was the pitch. Now, you're the client."

In Feburary, I read an article online about 25 Belgian agencies that had launched a "virtual strike" to protest unfair pitching practices by their clients.  For one week, if you visited any of their homepages, you were welcomed with a message that said "As you can see, we have replaced our regular website with this letter. It’s going to stay up one week to express our discontent. .."
And then, by clicking from one agency homepage to the next, one could read the full text of why Belgian agencies had grown discontented with the current pitch-happy scenario, and they made two major claims:

1. Pitches cost a lot of money, and if you're competing in a 10-agency shootout, the chances of you winning are 10%, but agencies continue have no choice but to invest a small fortune in the equivalent of a boxing match, as they go from round to round in order to win new business.
2. If agencies are spending all their time working on pitches, guess what they're not working on? Client business. As we all know, we usually divert our best resources - creative & strategic to pitches instead of client work, so it is the client's work that ultimately suffers.

According to Luc De Leersnyder, CEO of the ACC, Belgium's association of communication companies, which masterminded the strike. "..if you're called into a pitch and know there are six or seven other guys and that you'll spend 80,000 Euros on the pitch, you have a better chance at a casino."

After reading about the Belgian's discontent, I cynically tweeted "Belgian agencies protest about pitch process. If they knew what we put up with in the UAE, they'd shut up."

And I'm sad to see that 2010 has proven to me just how correct that cynical tweet was.

One week later, I received an RFP for the redesign of a portal – it consisted of three pages: a cover page requesting three sets of design concepts, a list of deliverables needed, and a disclaimer. No brief, no brand guidelines. Upon calling the prospective client, I was told "I'm fed up with all of you agencies asking for a brief and brand guidelines- just use your imagination!"  It turns out that 10 agencies had been invited to this pitch, and while some of my industry peers also turned down this invitation, all it takes is for one of us to accept these terms to make this sort of "brief" acceptable.

Not to be outdone, another Marketing Director sent out an integrated communications pitch brief to 19 agencies - regardless of our specialty - PR, advertising or digital. I know this because she was nice enough to accidentally CC all 19 of us on the tender invitation. Some days, you just can't make it up...

Along with the waves of sackings and unpaid invoices that accompanied the global recession, our industry has suffered another casualty: the cheapening of everything we do. Suddenly, agencies no longer find themselves in demand or able to differentiate ourselves through our original thinking. Instead, we now find ourselves at the mercy of procurement departments and enthusiastic marketing directors who know that they now have the pick of the litter. And who can blame them? While there are still as many agencies as ever in town (including all the new ones who have flocked to the region), there are fewer advertisers than ever with real money to spend. And so they find themselves in a unique position far away from the seller's market we enjoyed in 2008.

Nowadays, it seems that every pitch invitation that comes across our desks requires endless rounds of free design concepts or campaigns, with the end result that the best agency is told they are too expensive, and that unless they reduce their costs to match the cheaper agencies, they can forget it. Quite often, pitches are cancelled or shelved indefinitely, rendering the hundreds of thousands dollars spent by multiple agencies completely wasted.

And while we continue to provide round after round of campaign ideas and free design concepts and appeal to the lowest common denominator, we are working to a zero-sum endgame in which only the agency willing to do the most for the least will win. We are devaluing the strategic thinking process behind our craft - the reason why each of our agencies feels that they have the best approach to creating arresting work that gets results.

One leading major advertising agency in the UAE - which enjoys its fair share of globally aligned work - still participated in 32 pitches last year for regionally based clients last year. And we're all guilty of this. Even though my agency refused to "pitch" for most client inquiries in 2008 in the heady days of Dubai's real estate and tourism boom, we find ourselves willing to do more and more in 2009 & 2010 to win less and less. After all, every agency has overheads and salaries, and sometimes in that desperation to win a new client or "get our foot in the door", we offer ourselves up cheaply or for free in the hope that it will pay dividends in the future.

I'm not saying that advertisers should not have the right to make the best-informed decisions about who their marketing partners will be, and I do not dispute that some of the best ideas ever created came out of the energy, enthusiasm and sky-high ambition that only a new pitch can generate, but I question the direction in which we are headed.

Agencies in the region come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and it does not take much to understand what each of us is good at.  And a 5-minute chat with an existing client about us is far more insightful than any polished credentials presentation we can put together. As the Belgian strike manifesto stated, “Judging an agency isn't rocket science. Our work is on every street corner, and all over the Internet." 

I'm not asking for end to the pitch process. Just a reality check and an acceptance that by making the selection process, more opaque, more competitive and less realistic in its expectations, we are ultimately denying everyone - agencies, clients and the media - the chance to align with the best partners. This will only lead to less inspired work, less growth and less opportunity for our next generation of Arabic advertising talent. We are consultants, not used-car salesmen.

But there is hope, and in my regular interactions with colleagues across the industry, we know that we cannot go on like this. I do not know what the answer is, and in our fractured state, it's unlikely that we would rally around a common charter and stick to it. It is a brave agency head that turns down a pitch for being unreasonable, incomplete or unsuitable, but it is starting to happen.

What was most striking about the global ad agency I mentioned earlier is not that they participated in 32 pitches in 2009, but the number they turned down: 128.