Pitching is a Symptom of a Broken System (What Are We Gonna Do About It?)
Every 5 or so years the “No Free Pitches” issue rears its head in our industry. Everyone seems to agree we can't afford to do it. But what does that say about the way our industry is running?
Invert! Always Invert!
In my last two posts I tried to create a steelman argument from the one neatly articulated on www.nofreepitches.com by adding a few other points I’ve seen made on Design Twitter, industry rags and LinkedIn over the past few years. Then, in the interest of creating a healthy debate, I suggested we consider do as the great mathematician Jacobi always advised, and inverted the thinking.
The counter-argument, then, is:
Pitching is more about what you know than who you know.
Pitching is a sign of a competitive market, and competition forces innovation.
Pitching an idea is not executing an idea, and an idea is only as valuable as its execution.
Pitching is not the reason our teams’ mental health suffers. But it is a good excuse.
Pitching makes meaningful work possible if we make time for it.
Pitching is an example of what we could do with more time (if that’s how we pitch it.)
Pitching for new business is a critical investment for (sm)all studios.
Pitching exposes how broken our business model is.
Pitching teaches us what clients value about our work. Let’s improve our pitch.
Pitching relies on knowing the true value of our product.
My first post I tried to cover what I thought was wrong about the specifics of the arguments. Next, I offered some ideas other businesses in other industries use. Finally, I want to talk about the bigger issue; the one I think this free pitching debate prevents us from discussing.
8. Pitching exposes how broken our business model is.
Pitching is a symptom of a broken system.
I think this is absolutely true. It's also what I see as our biggest opportunity for innovation and change, starting with difficult conversations about hard problems. However, instead of having this conversation, we've done a bait and switch, and had a much easier one instead.
Here's the bait:
What perfect storm of factors led to this reality (post-pandemic anxiety, economic uncertainty, risk averse executives) isn’t what we’re here to unpack. We’re here because unpaid and underpaid pitches have increasingly become the rule, not the exception — and that’s a problem.
— www.nofreepitches.com
It could be our reluctance to embrace digital. Our inability to work with other agencies and in-house teams. Or it could be our collective lack of an answer to the threat of AI and democratising design platforms like Figma and Canva. Or it could be that the agency model was never really all that well constructed? I find it curious that the person who’s made the most money out of this business was a classic 80s corporate raider who bought a Wire and Plastic Products company and then conducted a series of LBOs in a heavily hedged “diversified portfolio” strategy. I don’t think it’s a surprise that anyone that’s sold their agency to WPP has wound up seeing their dreams crushed in the gears of a corporate machine; the inner-workings of the companies it bought meant as much to the shareholders as the inner workings of the 20 stocks you’ve got in your portfolio. Who cares how NVDIA is run? I like the stock!
This is, I think, deeply important. Until we have a model for how to make creativity and commerce work in a mutually beneficial environment, they’re going to keep acting like a couple on the brink of divorce: embittered, petulant, cynical. How do we create a healthy dynamic between the two, the kind famed couples therapist describes in the sentiment “You being you allows me to be me”?
I don't have the answer, obviously. But I think the best thing we can do is focus our time and energy coming up with viable solutions. Because otherwise we’re fixing a symptom, not a cause. Rearranging deck chairs on the proverbial Titanic.
The fact that the biggest studios in the world (or at least, the studios with the best clients) can’t seem to afford losing a pitch is like a pimple on an unhealthy patch of skin. The way you fix the problem isn’t popping the pimple; you’ll just get another one. What you need to do instead is take a good hard look in the mirror and ask why your skin is so unhealthy, and what you can do to fix it.
But looking in a mirror is the opposite of what we're all doing.
Rather than having nuanced takes or asking hard questions, everything I’ve seen online has been a chorus of groaning agreement and a fair amount of complaining and scapegoating of clients, or the system, or perhaps capitalism in general. It has more in common with Gen Z TikTok trends or Occupy Wall Street than it does any kind of serious business chat.
It is something of an iron law of the species that no good thinking, meaningful change or useful innovation comes from situations where everyone has the same answer, and even less when that answer is that someone else is at fault. Breaking us out of this modality of confirmation bias, tribalism and circular reasoning was the great achievement of the enlightenment, and was equally reflected in the Royal Society’s motto “Nullius in verba” which was really just a fancy way of saying “just because everyone says so doesn’t make it so.”
So, why is our industry so susceptible to disruption?
9. Pitching teaches us what clients value about our work. Let’s improve our pitch.
“Pitching makes clients value our work less. What we do is nothing short of magic, why would we give it away for free?”
This is one of the biggest problems we have in our industry. We don’t know how to value our work. And so we don’t know how to explain that value to clients.
I saw this the other day, from a guy who seems quite successful. He’s worked with some of the biggest brands in the world.
And he described what he did as “Magic.”
Per David Deutsch, this is about as bad an explanation as “the Gods did it.”
A good rule of thumb is that anyone who can’t explain what they’re selling to you either doesn’t understand their own product, or doesn’t want you to.
In fact, the “it’s magic” pitch has only really worked for 1) Hugh Jackman in The Prestige, 2) Edwin Land. Both times the answer wasn’t magic, it was science.
Land, the enigmatic founder of Polaroid, often quoted Clark’s Third Law when talking about his revolutionary product:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
The difference, of course, is that his SX70 only felt like magic to the user who couldn’t explain how it worked. He could. So to him, it was an advanced (and well-patented) technology. One that he could reproduce over and over and over again.
And, just as important, he never tried to argue that his advanced camera was valuable because it was magic. The outcome (a photograph, instantly) was inherently valuable. Once that was established, the how added to the mystery, sure. But a full and proper explanation was always there. Land knew how the product he sold worked.
Can we say the same?
We have a tendency in our industry to speak tautologically about why what we do is valuable: our argument often regresses to arguing that creativity is valuable, as opposed to why or how it creativity is valuable. “Creativity is valuable because it is” is generally the idea.
For instance, “design is important to your bottom line” is a refrain I hear a lot; often at design conferences.
And it definitely is. But how? The burden of proof is on those of us who make the assertion. As Hitchens used to say:
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
10. Pitching relies on knowing the true value of our product.
It’s an old trope of the industry that if you want to sell a drill, sell the hole.
Are we clear on the hole story?
We say that brand and advertising drives value for a business. And we’re right. How many businesses in the S&P 500 have brands you don’t recognise? Does anyone think that’s a coincidence?
“The single-most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by a tenth of a cent, then you've got a terrible business.”
— Warren Buffet
Munger and his partner Warren Buffett became two of the most successful investors of all time by consistently investing in businesses that had both “Pricing Power” and a “Durable Competitive Advantage”. What drives both of those?
Brand does.
“Gross margin is where you look to understand the strength of a brand.”
— Ben Gilbert
And yet none of us seem to be seizing this insight. We insist on calling what we do magic, shrugging our collective shoulders and pointing to the gods like Rick Rubin on a podcast tour.
How are we leveraging creativity as a force for value generation? Better yet, how are we valuing our creativity? And why are we leaving it up to everyone else to do it?
Disrupting the Disruptors
We’re an industry that loves a shakeup. We love to help clients think big and be bold. We see disruption as a forcing function for necessary innovation; the destruction of yesterday’s imperfect models as a vital part of the creative process. We think this way partially because it’s progressive and adroit, and partially because we get paid to think this way.
But what about our industry? How do we deal with disruption? With change? With progress? What do we do when the market sends us signals that we need to evolve or die?
As the saying goes, price is what you pay, and value's what you get. If clients can’t see value in what we do, we have three choices:
Be better at convincing them (which is kind of our jobs), or
Provide better evidence that our work is valuable (likely by adopting some kind of quantitative metrics) or;
Create a better product
I don't think we should excuse ourselves from constantly wanting to do all three. And with the challenges our industry will continue to face in an age of increasing digitisation, democratisation and AI, I don’t think we can afford not to.
As ever, things will get hard for those who are too soft. And as ever, those who refuse this technological shift will go the way of the Luddite who yelled "Smash the looms!" instead of learning and adapting.
But for those willing to embrace progress, a new world awaits: it has never been cheaper and easier to produce great work, collaborate with clients, systemetize and operationalise our thinking, and take credit for the impact we insist we can have.
If necessity is the mother of all invention, and risk and reward are reliably inversely correlated, then there’s never been a better time to get creative about our business model. Now’s the time where we should be brainstorming new ways of creating, communicating and selling our services.
Taking Creative Agency
We are, if we choose to be, responsible for our own system. How much it costs us to produce work, how much we sell it for. Whether we look after our staff in the process. Whether we choose to work together, rather than jealously holding all of our magic playing cards. Whether we innovate, or die off.
Let's at least start by empowering ourselves to act. Rather than looking out the window for the problem, let’s look in the mirror. At the end of the day, if any other business had acquisition costs as low as we all enjoy but couldn’t make money, we’d be asking ourselves what the hell was wrong with the business model. Maybe it’s time we do the same.
As Munger used to always say:
“If you think someone is ruining your life, it’s you.”
If you want to read the rest of this series, you can start with why we can’t afford not to pitch, or just jump to some of the tools and techniques we use to get paid to pitch for free. And if you want more of this sort of stuff, then don’t forget to like and subscribe.