CREATIVE pitches, according to AFA executive director Lesley Brydon, are on the nose: they waste time and money agencies can ill afford to spend when their profit margins are under continual pressure. And the AFA is gearing up to do something about them.
“Millions of dollars a year are wasted on pitches,” Brydon told B&T this week. “Clients don’t understand what they are requiring agencies to do when they ask [for a creative pitch]. We would prefer to see [reviews] confined to a strategic pitch.”
Interestingly, while agency MDs typically rail about the nonsense of developing creative concepts that will probably never be used outside the pitch process to answer briefs that often aren’t real, less than 25% of AFA members responded to the AFA’s member survey on the issue sent out last year.
A senior AFA member told B&T about 38 of the AFA’s 160 member agencies responded to the survey.
Of these, around half said they would prefer only to make credentials pitches in account reviews, or credentials plus strategy.
Agencies typically spend upwards of $50,000 on each creative pitch, often outlaying several times that amount to present creative concepts when a large account is in the offing.
The AFA appears to view this issue as a way of pushing back against advertisers who are becoming increasingly adept at negotiating agency costs down.
“If clients want to reduce the cost of agencies’ services they must use them judiciously and not wastefully,” Brydon said.
She told B&T no actual course of action on pitches had yet been determined; the AFA would first go back to members with the survey findings.
However, the AFA source says the AFA wants something “stronger than guidelines” outlining minimum costs to advertisers of holding creative pitches, provisions for establishing and protecting agency charges up front, and guarding the intellectual property of concepts presented in creative pitches.
The Australian Association of National Advertisers has not yet been contacted about the matter. But some of its members are being criticised for not abiding by pitch guidelines the AFA and AANA developed together six years ago.
Brydon even went so far as to say there are some “some serial offenders”—ie. marketers who regularly mis-use creative pitches—among the AANA’s own member base.
But the real problem is there will need to be concerted action from AFA members on the issue for any real leeway to be made.
And in the past, agencies have not been averse to sacrificing their profit margin in order to put on business.
Similar attempts have been made by the Australian Graphic Design Association to educate members about the downside of free creative pitches . However, the key problem is that AGDA members do not always abide by their own guidelines.
The AFA’s rollback on pitches may be set for the same fate.
Agency consultant Wayne Wood, recently retired from Whybin TBWA Melbourne, is taking another approach—to ‘out’ marketers on a blacklist for questionable review practices.
Issues relating to trade practices and defamation would need to be handled carefully, but Wood already has one story up his sleeve of a marketer who held a review, opted not to appoint one of the pitching agencies, but then asked if they could use one of their creative ideas.
But one agency MD has raised another problem with that approach: what’s to stop advertisers from creating a ‘blacklist’ of their own?
