Thanks for pitching. What’s next?
8 min. reading
In architectural competitions, it feels completely normal to see what everyone submitted once the competition is over. We can understand why one proposal won and another didn’t. And all of it is public.
In creative and strategic work for brands, things often work very differently. A black box. Silence.
The principle is the same. Several teams receive the same brief. They invest their time, experience and know-how. They develop a solution. One of them wins.
So why shouldn’t the same level of transparency apply here?
We have nothing against pitches. Quite the opposite. We run them ourselves when selecting our own suppliers.
One supplier wins the project today, another will get job next time. And everyone knows who they were competing against and why we made the decision we did.
If an agency is genuinely competing for a brand’s business, it should know what it won or lost against once the pitch is over. And why.
Instead, what often arrives is an email:
“Thank you for participating. We selected a solution that better meets our requirements.”
And that’s where it ends.
The Bermuda Triangle. Ask why, and sometimes the answer is that, according to internal policies, the client isn’t required to explain the decision any further.
Maybe they aren’t.
But if you’re asking someone to invest tens or even hundreds of hours of work, it shouldn’t be about what a brand isn’t required to do. It should be about what’s fair. If you don’t know what ultimately drove the decision, how your proposal was evaluated, or what you actually lost to… that isn’t transparency.
That’s simply being told the result.
Show agencies what they lost to
Not winning a pitch is fine. Someone may come up with a better idea. Have more relevant experience. Be a better fit on a human level. Or simply be able to deliver the project at a lower cost.
An agency should then have the opportunity to say:
“Yeah. This is better. We understand why you chose this direction.”
And learn something from it.
But sometimes, a few months later, you see the final execution and you’re even more confused.
What the brief said was important isn’t there. The required extensions have disappeared. The final solution has gone in a completely different direction.
That doesn’t mean your proposal should have won. It means you don’t understand what the decision was actually based on.
- Sometimes you submit a proposal based on the brief. You make it to the next round. The client asks you to develop the concept further, add more options and expand the scope. You do.
And then an email from procurement arrives saying you’ve exceeded the project’s budget limit. But if the brand expands the scope during the pitch, it’s hard to pretend the budget won’t change with it.
- Sometimes a brand invites you to pitch, lets you work for several weeks, and only later do you realise that while you were standing at the starting line, someone else was already practically on the podium.
- Other times, you make it into an agency pool, only to discover that being in the pool doesn’t mean getting work. It just means swimming among those who might be invited to pitch again next time.
- And sometimes, months later, you see the final execution and recognise your own idea. The only thing missing is your name.
When architects design a new public square, we routinely get to see the winning proposal alongside the other submissions. Why should creative or strategic work for a brand be any different?
If a pitch was genuinely fair, why shouldn’t its outcome stand up to transparency?
We don’t need to disclose pricing or commercial secrets. But every participant should know what the decision was based on and what proposal actually won the pitch.
A brand only owns what it paid for
A pitch shouldn’t be a way to collect five concepts and build a sixth from the best parts of each.
Once someone shows you an idea, you can’t unsee it.
This isn’t a radical idea. The American Association of Advertising Agencies (4As) explicitly addresses the ownership of strategies, concepts and work created during the pitch process in its guidance and warns that an agency search should not become an “idea bank.”
During pitches, agencies hand over strategies, concepts, mechanics, itemised budgets, designs and production solutions.
The client often demands transparency from agencies without offering the same transparency in return.
And sometimes, teams lose a pitch only to see something strangely familiar in the final execution a few months later.
Did the winning agency come up with the same idea? Absolutely possible.
Did it emerge during further development? Maybe.
Or did part of one of the other proposals somehow make its way into the final execution?
Without transparency, it’s almost impossible to know.
And that’s exactly why transparency doesn’t just protect those who lost.
It protects the winner and the client, too.
If you can see that the winning agency already had the same idea in its pitch proposal, there’s nothing to question. They had it too. They were better. Congratulations.
We connect people with brands.
We design what customers experience with them.
We turn experiences into business results.
Did You Ever Have a Chance to Win?
Then there’s an even more uncomfortable scenario.
A company already has a preferred partner. Procurement needs three bids. Global policies require a tender. The internal process requires a comparison. All of that can happen.
But if you already know who you want to work with, work with them.
Don’t invite other teams into a pitch just to legitimise a decision that has already been made.
Because on the other side, there aren’t just three PDFs. There are people who will spend days working on them.
It’s unfair to them and it damages the brand’s reputation.
Agencies talk to each other. People move between them. Marketers change companies.
If a brand starts earning a reputation that “there’s no point pitching for them,” eventually the best teams may simply stop showing up.
And then the brand is no longer choosing the best solution on the market.
It’s choosing the best of the average solutions submitted by those who were still willing to take part.
At a conference organised by the Czech Event Association, which had itself introduced Code of Conduct for fairer agency selection processes, one of its clients was invited to speak about choosing an agency.
The pitch went through the standard process, only for the client to cancel it in the end and award the project to an agency that had declined to participate.
The reason? She wanted to work with that agency. And that’s perfectly fine. Just don’t make everyone else run a race when the chosen winner never even had to enter it.
A Free Pitch Isn’t Free
If you want real work, pay for it.
Because free work isn’t actually free.
Strategists, creatives, designers and producers all get paid.
If five agencies each invest a hundred hours in a pitch, someone has to pay for those 500 hours.
If it isn’t the client, the agencies will. And ultimately, they have to earn that money back from the clients they do win.
Nor should agencies be expected to absorb the cost when brand management simply changes its mind and decides not to move forward with the project.
A free pitch costs money just like any other work done for a brand. The bill simply goes to someone else. And in the end, that someone may still be you — just from a different budget, and at the cost of one more activity you could have done instead.
We’ve even been part of a pitch with two clearly defined rounds, where agencies progressing to the second round were promised a pre-agreed fee for the additional work.
After the first round, the client asked us to revise and further develop our proposal — exactly the kind of work we would have expected to do in the second round. But formally, we were told that this was not yet considered the second round.
So we continued developing the proposal. And then the pitch ended.
No second round. No fee.
The rules may not have been broken.
Their purpose certainly was.
Choose the People First. Then Their Work.
The selection process doesn’t have to be complicated.
A brand invites several teams.
It gets to know their people, their work, their credentials and the way they think.
It finds out whether they understand the brand and whether there’s a good fit on a human level.
This part can absolutely be free.
The agency is selling itself.
Then the brand chooses two or three.
The ones it would genuinely be willing to work with.
And tells them:
Now show us how you would actually solve our problem.
At that point, something has changed. The agency has started working for the brand..
Research, strategy, creative concepts, visualisations and specific solutions have value even if they don’t ultimately win.
The brand doesn’t have to pay the full price. It can simply set aside a fraction of the planned project budget to compensate the people the brand manager has approached precisely because they can do something the brand cannot do itself.
It’s not really about the money. It’s about respecting the work.
And it also forces clients to make a better pre-selection. If a brand pays something for every concept it asks to be developed, it probably won’t invite eight agencies to the final round.
This is also the direction taken by industry bodies such as ANA, 4As, the UK’s IPA and ISBA, and Australia’s AANA and MFA: greater transparency, a sensible shortlist, clear criteria, protection of agencies’ work, and compensation for finalists.
A Good Pitch Shouldn’t Destroy Relationships. It Should Build Them.
Maybe the biggest waste happens after the pitch is over. Imagine receiving two great proposals. One is simply a better fit for that particular project.
So you choose it.
Why should that mean the relationship with the other agency has to end?
You’ve just spent weeks getting to know their people, their work and the way they think. They might be perfect for your next project.
And yet, too often, it ends with “thank you for participating” followed by years of silence.
Sometimes, the same person only gets in touch again after moving to another brand. And that’s when you discover that your proposal was actually great. The brand just wasn’t ready for it at the time. Or simply didn’t have the guts to make it happen.
That’s a waste. For everyone.
Likewise, an agency pool makes just as little sense if all it really means is: “You’re on a list of agencies the brand might invite to pitch someday.”
A brand doesn’t have to split the work equally. Different partners can be great at different things. But an agency pool should be a portfolio of capabilities, not a contact list. And a pitch doesn’t have to end with one winner and five lost contacts.
It can end with one winner and several new relationships.
We connect people with brands.
We design what customers experience with them.
We turn experiences into business results.
Maybe We Don’t Need Another Code of Conduct
The industry already has rules, guidelines and best practices.
But maybe the principle is much simpler.
- Only invite those who have an equal chance of winning.
- A brand only owns what it paid for.
- If you want real work, pay for it.
- When you make a decision, show why.
- Thank you for participating” can be the beginning of something more.
This isn’t a new code of conduct.
It’s just common decency.
Do You Even Need a Pitch?
If you’ve read this far, you probably already know the answer.
If you’re looking for a creative or strategic partner, go meet agencies. Get to know their people, their work and the way they think. Find out whether you understand each other — and whether there’s a real fit.
Don’t choose a partner simply based on who performs best in one artificial competitive situation. The best work doesn’t come from a pitch. It comes from partnership, trust and getting to know each other.
And if you still decide to run a pitch?
Choose. Compare. Compete.
Just remember: if you ask agencies for transparency, offer the same in return.
Because a good pitch doesn’t have to end with one winner and several losers.
It can end with one winner and several new relationships.
And If You Invite Us to Pitch?
We’ll bring you our best work.
In return, we’ll ask for just a few things.
- A real chance to win.
- Clear rules.
- Respect for our work and our ideas.
- And when you make your decision, we want to understand why.
If someone better wins, we’ll be happy to congratulate them.
And maybe we’ll create something great together next time.
Author
Jiri Machacek
CEO & Chief Brand Strategist ✓ Certified Experience Economy Expert