• by Tig Tillinghast , August 9, 2002

The entire premise of a new business pitch does not reflect the day-to-day reality of how an agency serves advertisers. Different people are put on the project than would actually service the account. The processes and tasks they perform are almost always different than what the agency does in the normal course of business.

This is both good and bad. Of course, it’s bad that the advertiser does not get a very accurate representation from which to choose its next agency. But the work that goes into the pitch often serves as the first – and often only – time the agency actually throws out all of its assumptions about the advertiser’s category and audience, creating a truly creative campaign.

Optimally, the advertiser would try to make a reversal. It should try to design a pitch process where it gets to see the “real” agency at work. Then, after it awards its account to one of the competitors, it should strive to make each campaign process much more like the pitch process – with new research, flexibility, media neutrality and all the other benefits that tend to follow a new account win.

Several problems prevent this frequent resetting of the marketing. Budgets obviously come into play. It’s more expensive to put more work into each new effort – especially when it involves new types of staff like account planners and researchers. The blame game also impedes marketing flexibility. Implicit in changing marketing directions is a vulnerability to charges of having been wrong previously.

But the most important factor that keeps the new business pitches the way they are is the fact that – for the advertiser – they’re a lot of fun. I don’t know of anyone in the industry more than a few years experience that doesn’t have a crazy new business pitch story. There is almost always a circus-like thrill to new business pitches. I think the intensity of this trend increased dramatically in the mid-90s when some high profile accounts were won by agencies employing cute gimmicks. For a while, no one could seem to resist putting an attention-grabbing gimmick in a pitch – often to hilarious and disastrous results.

To get real results from a pitch, advertisers should consider these tactics:

Instead of having the agency do new work on the advertiser’s brand, the advertiser should follow agency staff on several existing accounts for a week or two.

Interview existing clients. Do not accept reference names from the agency, but rather choose the clients that the advertiser feels are most relevant to their own situation.

Get a list of people who would staff the new account, and interview them.

Too often, the advertiser gets a glimpse at the work of the agency’s new business team, not the team that would serve the new account. Promises of putting certain staff members on the new account often get chiseled down to a small percentage of those people’s time. And once that percentage goes below 20 percent, the person often becomes more of a cost liability than a useful resource to the account.

But advertisers get what they deserve. And what they deserve is determined by how they go about their search.