Fix The Pitch

Would you enter a running race where you pay to compete, but as you stand on the starting line, you don't know how many competitors there are? Where the prize is unclear except that only one person wins and everyone else gets nothing? Where the race distance isn't defined and can be changed mid-race, usually making it longer? Where the referees watch intermittently when it's convenient for them, and you're not sure which one actually calls the winner, or if the real referee is even watching at all? Where, after months of training for running, someone might win for their swimming?

You wouldn't. Right?

That's insane. Nobody would commit themselves physically, mentally, and financially to a competition structured for maximum waste and minimum fairness.

But agencies do it every day when they pitch.

U.S. agencies spend up to 17% of their annual revenues chasing new business, according to Forrester. That number stopped me. Seventeen percent? But after running the math on hard and soft costs, it's likely right. The real pitch cost is not the hard costs, it's the opportunity cost of having some of your best people not doing other things, the risks that you take on existing paying clients to chase the high of winning another, and the mental health toll on all involved.

I've been on both sides of the pitch table. As a client at Coca-Cola, Nokia and Orange, I've run reviews. As CMO at Publicis, I saw the other side at the highest levels, the war rooms, the cancelled holidays, the Sunday nights where the best creative minds were making speculative work for a prospect instead of delivering for the clients paying their salaries. In fact I carry a pitch scar with me every day: I'm deaf in my right ear, having lost my hearing when I physically burned out on a 9-month global pitch I was leading. We won, but its not even close to being worth it.

So let me say this: the pitch process is an industry-wide subsidy paid by existing clients and agency staff for the benefit of procurement departments and pitch consultants.

When private company selects an investment bank to lead a multi-billion dollar IPO, the process takes weeks. Not months. Weeks. For a decision of far higher value than some ads and media. Goldman Sachs doesn't build a bespoke pitch roadshow using its best people for six months on the off-chance that a client might choose them. The bank presents its credentials, its track record, its team. The client decides. Business begins.

Lawyers operate the same way. So do management consultancies. McKinsey doesn't produce three months of free strategic thinking to prove they can do strategic thinking.

Only in advertising do we accept a model where professional services firms donate months of their most expensive talent's time, produce work for free, and then watch the vast majority of it vanish into the shredder.

We've normalised insanity.

For discrete and specialist functions pitching can make sense. When clients pursued "best of breed" models by selecting a media specialist here, a creative shop there, a digital agency somewhere else, then the reviews could be discrete and focused. A creative pitch might take six weeks. A media review, maybe eight.

Then came integrated reviews.

As holding companies consolidated services and clients demanded single-point accountability, the pitch should have become simpler. If you're buying the orchestra, you shouldn't need each section to audition separately.

Instead, integrated reviews became sprawling, multi-month affairs. Six months is now common. I've seen reviews stretch past nine months. The scope expanded. The documentation expanded. The number of agencies in the process expanded. What was meant to simplify selection became a bureaucratic endurance test that tests an agency's capacity to absorb pain, not its ability to do great work.

Back to our race metaphor: this is the point where the referees announce, mid-race, that you're now running a marathon instead of a 10K. Good luck.

Here's where the incentive structure gets truly perverse.

An entire layer of intermediaries with monikers like pitch consultants, search consultants, review managers, has grown up around this dysfunction. Their business model depends on reviews being large, lengthy, and complex. A pitch consultant's fee is proportional to the scope and duration of the review.

Shorter reviews mean smaller fees. Simpler processes mean less perceived value. Fewer agencies in the process means less work to manage.

The incentive is structural: pitch consultants benefit from the very bloat that destroys agency economics.

These are the referees who keep changing the race distance. Because the longer the race, the more they get paid. They will say below that this is not true, that they advise clients to pitch only as a last resort. But this is not true. They earn on volume, velocity and duration. Full stop. They have their toothless standards and 'Pledges' that are ignored.

I'm not saying pitch consultants don't add value in some circumstances. But when most pitches involve agencies that have no idea how many competitors they're up against or who they are, something has broken. Transparency should be the baseline, not the aspiration.

a. The reasons for a pitch rarely match the reasons for a win.

Clients say they want fresh creative thinking. They say they want strategic innovation. And I believe that they believe this, but the vast majority of reviews are won on commercial terms. The pitch is to make sure you are good enough on the other stuff, and best on the numbers. This is the swimming-beats-running problem. You train for months as a runner, and the referee awards the prize to someone who swam instead.

b. "It keeps the team sharp"

No. Proponents claim pitching is healthy competition that forces agencies to bring their best. But what it actually does is pull the agency's best talent away from paying clients. The creative director missing from your Wednesday status meeting? They're in the pitch war room. The strategist who was supposed to lead your brand review? Redeployed.

c. The material and human cost is never recovered.

This is where the insanity of the race comes to live, in the people running it. People canceling dinner plans to build strategy for a phantom client. Missing your kid's school play to rehearse a presentation for people who might not show up. You're working Saturday afternoon on speculative creative while actual clients wait for work you promised them on Friday.

The cognitive dissonance is corrosive. You know the process is broken. You know you're being exploited. But you do it anyway because saying no feels like career suicide.

So you smile through the exhaustion. You call it 'hunger.' You call it 'drive.'

The slow erosion of boundaries until you don't remember what 'reasonable hours' even means. A symptom of an industry that's normalised psychological damage as the cost of entry. We've created a professional culture where sacrificing your wellbeing is considered 'being committed.'

It's not commitment. It's exploitation dressed up as ambition.

d. It enables bad client behaviour.

When there's no cost to initiating a review, some clients use pitches as free consulting. They call reviews to pressure incumbent agencies on price. They run "courtesy" pitches to satisfy procurement requirements with no intention of switching. They tire-kick.

The pitch process, because it's free to the client, carries no penalty for waste.

e. The messy middle makes it worse.

Holding companies under margin pressure (and right now, that's most of them) are using pitches to buy or retain business at below-market rates. In an industry where the Great Compression is squeezing margins from every direction, struggling agencies are dropping their prices in competitive reviews to hold onto revenue at any cost.

They're poisoning the well for everyone, setting client expectations for pricing that makes sustainable service delivery impossible.

The pitch isn't going to disappear overnight and I can't just wish it away. But the industry can move toward practices every other professional services sector figured out decades ago.

Back to our race metaphor. If you're going to run this race, here's what needs to change. You may read these and nod along and think they are obvious minimum standards. But let me be clear - the majority of pitches, even the largest scale ones, do not have these rules in place:

1. The prize must be clear

The specific value and scope of what is in review must be clear at the outset. Without this, agencies will always overestimate and therefore over invest. Then when that over investment becomes a sunk cost later in the race, they make bad commercial decisions to try to recover it. The commercial fundamentals should be agreed first, before the first slide of the first deck.

2. Race organisers should pay

If a client wants speculative strategic thinking and creative work, compensate the agencies for it. Even a modest pitch fee would achieve two things: it would force clients to be serious about their intent, and it would limit the number of agencies in the process to those the client genuinely considers viable. This is the entry fee that proves the race is real, not theatre.

3. The length and route must be clear

Shorten the timeline. If an investment bank can compete for a billion-dollar mandate in three weeks, an agency can present its credentials, team, and strategic approach in six. Cap reviews at eight weeks maximum. Anything longer is scope creep that serves consultants, not clients. No changing the race distance mid-stride.

4. The field of competitors should match the prize

Reduce the field. Three agencies maximum. Five or six agencies in a pitch is theatre. If you can't narrow your consideration set to three credible options before the formal process begins, you haven't done your homework as a client. You need to know how many runners are competing for that one prize.

5. The rules of determining the winner must be immutable

Disclose the actual decision criteria upfront and what actually determines the winner.

The process should be transparent and the evaluation criteria should be fixed before the race begins. Don't make runners train for a marathon if you're actually judging diving form. Don't ask for strategic innovation if you're choosing based on who offers the lowest price. Don't demand creative work if the decision comes down to who the CEO knows personally. Immutable means the criteria don't change mid-process. What was important in week one should be important in week eight. The referee can't suddenly decide chemistry matters more than capability after agencies have spent months demonstrating capability.

6. The referee must be present at every stage

Real decision makers must be involved throughout. The CMO who will actually make the final call can't show up only at final presentations. The procurement officer who holds budget authority can't be absent from strategic discussions. The CEO who has veto power and is golfing buddies with an agency CEO can't be "briefed later."

If the real referee isn't watching the race, the race is meaningless.

I know that feels impossible when revenue is under pressure and clients are scarce, but you can say "no". But every pitch an agency enters at unsustainable economics reinforces the system. Every below-market fee accepted in desperation sets a new floor.

The agencies that will thrive through the Great Compression won't be the ones that won the most pitches. They'll be the ones that chose their clients as carefully as their clients chose them.

Sometimes the right move is to not enter the race at all.

Sadly, I fear that with the great compression underway, it may get worse than this. Starving underperforming holdcos will do anything to survive, and if it costs their people, or damages the economic foundations of the industry, but it means that they limp through another quarter, they will.

It's time we stopped tolerating it.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 16 February 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.