We Can’t Afford to Not Pitch
Every 5 or so years the “No Free Pitches” issue rears its head in our industry. But while everyone seems to agree that we can't afford to invest in creative pitches, I think we can't afford not to.
Invert! Always Invert!
Porto Rocha’s www.nofreepitches.com well articulates the argument I’ve seen 2-3 times over my 20 years in the industry:
Pitching is a symptom of a broken system.
Pitching is extremely time and resource intensive.
Pitching mandates unreasonable deadlines that impede meaningful work
Pitching strains team mental health and motivation.
Pitching is political: who you know is often as important as what you present.
Pitching puts your ideas at risk of being used even if not selected.
Pitching excludes many who don’t have the resources to participate.
Pitching creates an unfair playing field between big and small studios.
Pitching is not the only option when it comes to evaluating a creative partner.
Pitching without pay is an outdated practice that no longer belongs in our industry.
In the interest of constructing a full argument, I’ll add some other points you’ll often hear:
Pitching isn't a reflection of what we can do with more time and deeper thought, and is in fact anathema to it.
Pitching creates untenable economics that none of us can afford; we’d need to have crazy margins to offset the price of pitches we don't win.
Pitching is a race to the bottom that will destroy our industry if we don't all stop it together.
Charlie Munger, famed investor, multidisciplinary thinker, Costco fanboy and potential Muppet inspiration, spent 99.9 years imploring all who’d listen that the best way to figure out a problem was to “Invert! Always invert!” So, if we really want to solve the problem ahead of us (that our industry is criminally undervalued), with some creative problem-solving and innovation, I believe we should consider the inverse of the prevailing wisdom to see if there may be any insights to leverage.
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.
I’ll attempt to address the first 5 here, break the next 4 off into some practical tools for business development that I’ve stolen from other industries (and found very useful) and then attempt to end with a bigger, perhaps deeper discussion about what larger problem free pitches might be symptomatic of.
1. Pitching is more about what you know than who you know.
“Pitching is more about who you know than what you know.”
If this were true, nobody would need to pitch in the first place. Nobody's asking anybody to pitch on how well an agency knows their favourite bottle of wine, or the names of their children. If pitches truly were about who you know, a creds pitch would be sufficient by definition. You could say “we worked with these clients. Would you like us to work with you?” and be done with it.
Pitching is one of the small meritocracies available to us in this industry. Not-pitching only serves those who already have those long-standing relationships.
We’ve been brought in as the wild card on pitches before, and if it weren’t for those opportunities we’d never have gotten in the door. For a small agency like Love and Money pitches are the only way to get a foot in the door. We’re not a big, established player with a Rolodex full of high-paying clients. Our social proof is low, so we need to prove our worth upfront.
It’s our ticket to the game, and we can’t afford not to play.
2. Pitching is a sign of a competitive market, and competition forces innovation.
“Pitching is a race to the bottom that will destroy our industry if we don't all stop it together.”
This is bad game theory. It's also collusion.
This “race to the bottom” idea is known as a Tragedy of the Commons, where the incentives of a single actor (say a fisherman) are not problematic on their own (wants to fish in the sea) but are problematic if everyone does it (too many fisherpersons, not enough fish).
However, this theory only holds if we’re playing a zero sum game: while there are only so many fish in the proverbial sea, a competitive market provides accretive value. The pie continues to grow as we provide more demand for a service that others find useful, and new ideas and innovations follow. Ecommerce didn’t die when Amazon figured out a way to leverage the internet to make getting stuff to customers cheaper. In fact, the inverse: while there are many things that Amazon has done awfully, we cannot pretend that the ecommerce pie is smaller as a result.
A deeper dive into how Game Theory works shows why this idea of banding together and refusing to do free pitches is impossible in practice. The appropriate mental model is The Prisoner’s Dilemma: a well-studied paradox in decision analysis in which two or more parties are asked to collaborate or betray each other in a double-blind scenario. The punch line is that this incentive structure leads to a predictable outcome: the prisoners both throw each other under the bus.
Similarly, while we might all agree to sign a pledge publicly, our incentives don’t align. And incentives always win. Which means in this chorus of agencies pledging their allegiance to the cause, there’s always someone(s) who will break ranks to win the business if they see an opportunity. And then we all go back to where we were in order to compete. (This is why the argument comes up every few years, and why everyone needs to “sign a pledge” to stop us from doing it.)
If you have to choose between shuttering your business or pretending your name isn’t #4,304 on a list on the internet, what are you going to do? What will you tell your team?
But while that might sound glum, there’s I think there’s a lot of opportunity here. A free market is built on a balance of competition and cooperation — it’s what drives us all forward.
In fact, this “competitive” function is so germane to the workings of a free and fair market that we have laws against any behaviour that’s "anti-competitive". To keep markets fair we need to keep individuals operating individually. So whenever a given industry bands together to do something to protect its profit margins at the expensive of its clients and customers a well-functioning governing body gets in and prevents it from happening.
As it well should. Because it’s the definition of collusion.
Imagine the outcry if you found out that the pharmaceutical industry was organising in this sort of way? Or oil conglomerates? Or airlines? Or banks? Or the automotive industry? Or big tech?
We needn’t imagine. In fact, the fact that Lina Khan isn’t currently sharpening her pencil should be humbling; it suggests nobody is taking us all that seriously.
If we want creativity to prosper in a capitalist economy, we need to make sure we have the economics in place that allow our creative minds to do their best work. That means understanding and leveraging free market dynamics to create grounds for intelligent innovation.
Or, in brand-and-advertising speak, embracing disruption.
3. Pitching an idea is not executing an idea, and an idea is only as valuable as its execution.
“Pitching puts your ideas at risk of being used even if not selected.”
John Doer said something like "Ideas are easy. Execution is everything." I think he stole the idea from Bernard Arnault. Who stole it from Steve Jobs. And while they mightn’t have come up with those ideas, they all did pretty well at executing on some pretty wildly creative stuff.
But while I agree execution is the hard part, I’m sure they’d all similarly agree that the ideas can do a disproportionate amount of heavy lifting relative to the effort they took to come up with. They win hearts and minds. Make people do all sorts of irrational stuff. And while original ideas seem to be hard for other industries (how many people have told you they’re “not creative”?) ours is celebrated for it. In fact, named for it.
Which means we have an edge.
We all no doubt have told the apocryphal story of Picasso, wherein he was asked at a party to draw a lady a picture. Once he was done, she asked if she could keep it. “5000 francs, madam,” he said. “But it only took you five minutes!” she replied, outraged. To which he cooly responded:
“No, madam, it took me my whole life.”
It’s true that Picasso worked for an extraordinarily long time, honing his craft through a range of trail-blazing styles. He’s rightly regarded as one of the great artists of the 20th century, one of the founding fathers of abstractionism. His vaunted position allowed him to charge as he liked, and turn down would-be buyers at parties.
But Picasso was also wrong; he clearly didn’t understand the concept of Marginal Cost. He’d already spent his lifetime crafting his art before he went to the party that night. So the cost to him was exactly that: 5 minutes. If he were to change his marketing strategy, he could have feasibly had a comfortable late-life career cranking out 50 franc sketches and effectively earning 600 francs an hour. Sounds gauche (and it is), but these days it’s pretty commonplace to see Ringo Star and other artists doing exactly that.
The point is our superpower as an industry is coming up with great insights and beautiful work quicker and cheaper than almost any other. In fact, all the best creatives I’ve worked with have said something along the lines of “If I can’t see how I’ll solve the problem in the first meeting, I know I’m fucked.” Our intuition, our ability to grok a complex or nuanced conversation is so often what we’re hired for.
Obviously there are limitations to go-with-your-first-idea thinking. But why wouldn’t we capitalise on our god-given talents to win work? It's low marginal cost to us, high value to our potential clients.
I once worked for a creative director who was utterly phenomenal at picking apart why everything he saw in the market was wrong or stupid. He was so busy doing that, I never saw him produce any good work of his own. I’m almost certain you’ve worked for this guy too; he’s currently all over Design Twitter, and in the comments section of every industry publication on the internet.
It's like this tea towel says:
If you could have done it, but didn't, what does it cost you? 5 minutes, probably.
So I think this is more concern of ego than concern of intellectual property. If you’re worried about someone stealing your ideas, just try cold calling one new client and giving them an idea for free. 99% of the time they won’t even agree to hear the idea, let alone steal it.
So if someone else takes your idea and runs with it, good luck to them. If they fuck it up, that’s too bad. And if they nail it, good for them. We’ll all have other great creative ideas; that’s our job title, after all.
4. Pitching is not the reason our teams’ mental health suffers. But it is a good excuse.
“Pitching strains team mental health and motivation.”
Actually, the way we run our businesses strains team mental health. Creating an unsustainable economic environment for creative people to do the best work of their lives strains motivation — at least, it does if you share the burden of that fiscal stress on your jrs by getting visibly strung out and telling them they need to work weekends or everyone’s getting fired.
I was talking to the strategy director of one of Australia’s most prestigious studios the other day, they told me about how their boss threw a stapler at a colleague. Neither of us were surprised. Are you? I’ve certainly seen worse.
Ours is the industry of what Jim Collins calls “The Genius with a Thousand Helpers.” This guy’s name’s on the door. His ideas are always right. His methods are mysterious. His mood is mercurial. His reasons are inconsistent. He’s the Principle that everyone pays for (even though they always get the Agent.) And yes, he’s usually a guy.
Our teams’ mental health is without a doubt one of the biggest issues in our industry. But it's not your client's responsibility to look after your employees. Nor is it the industry's — though I greatly admire the work of Never Not Creative.
Do you feel responsible for the team culture and mental health issues at Westpac? Are you reconsidering your rates so that the good people at British Airways are able to have more money to pay their teams properly? Of course not. Why would you? So why blame our clients for how we look after our teams? That’s like getting upset at your neighbour for how you’re raising your kids.
If you find your team burning out, ask yourself how you can be a better manager. Ask yourself why you have so many staff on board with so little certainty in your pipeline (I’ve had to ask myself this too many times). Ask whether you can afford those trips to Cannes. And if your client’s deadlines don’t work for you, hire a better account manager, or spend time learning how to negotiate like Chris Voss.
We can’t afford to not pitch.
The next question is, how do we afford to? The answer is the same as it is for everyone else: invest in Brand, Advertising and Sales as a Cost of Acquisition.
In my next post, I break down how we think about pitching, and how we budget the costs out. There’s a spreadsheet you can steal. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss it.