Taking the pitch: agencies report ‘bad behavior’ from marketers during reviews

Louisa O’Connor, managing director at experiential and events agency Seen Presents, tells The Drum she saw two million-pound projects revised to 20% of their original budget deep into the pitching process.

She says: “It’s just a complete waste of time, responding to something that isn’t real any more. Then you’ve got to decide if you still want to be in the mix for that or pull out completely.”

According to a survey of over 260 agencies commissioned by new business consultancy JFDI and conducted by Opinium, 43% of agencies in the UK say that clients had canceled pitches because they had revised their budgets down – a figure that has risen 10% since 2022.

41% said pitches had been dropped without marketers giving any reason, while 33% said pitches had been canceled after they’d started because of changing economic conditions.

Charlie Carpenter, chief executive officer of pitch consultancy Creativebrief, tells The Drum he saw “two or three” such situations last year.

He says: “Clients had got the ball rolling with a pitch process and then turned around and said, ‘Our budgets have been changed, the money’s not there, we need to put this on pause.’”

The JFDI survey, which was conducted in October, demonstrates the impact of last year’s tough market on agencies. But O’Connor says Seen Presents had experienced clients pulling out of pitches or revising budgets downwards as recently as November.

Matt Iliffe, co-founder of UK agency Beyond, reports similar experiences: “We’ve had a lot more uncertainty around what budgets are when we’re pitching. Over the last year, we’ve seen lots of bad behaviors around pitches and work we’ve done.”

That has included clients refusing to share the size of the budget on offer or fishing around for agencies desperate enough to take on work at a reduced rate, he says. “It’s a hard market at the moment.”

The increasingly close involvement of advertisers’ procurement and finance teams in the pitching process has led to a greater emphasis on cost over quality or considerations of fairness, O’Connor says.

“The fact that they’re so removed from the day-to-day and knowing how these things work allows them to just be able to make those decisions, not realizing the impact. They have their own pressures but don’t necessarily see the knock-on effect.”

The responses available to agencies facing a radically adjusted budget are limited. Pulling out might be the responsible financial decision, but agencies are likely to lose out on time and cash sunk into a project.

“A couple of times, we’ve started working on a live project and, halfway through, there’s been a ‘pivot’ and the budget has been allocated elsewhere and we’ve had to ‘pivot’ with it,” says O’Connor. “At that point, you don’t have a choice – you have to continue because, otherwise, you’re just going to waste the money you’ve spent.”

In the case of a long-term client relationship, it might be wiser to stick with a project so that when budgets do return, the bridge remains unburned.

Despite that, agencies have had to adjust their approaches to pitching to compensate. Iliffe says Beyond’s new business strategy has become more discriminating. “As an agency last year, we were maybe too enthusiastic to go for things we shouldn’t have done. This year, we are going to be a lot more selective.”

O’Connor says that her agency has worked to bring procurement and finance teams down to the experiential projects as they’re being built. “We try and get them down to the experiences, to see where the money’s going to and to get them to understand that this isn’t just a figure on a page. It’s helping a little bit, but there’s still a massive disconnect.”

In addition to the handbrake turns seen in those pitches, Carpenter says marketers have been taking longer to decide between agencies during a pitch. That’s not much use for agencies hoping for commercial growth, but he says it can signal marketers are serious about a long-term relationship.

“In a funny way, I think that’s a good thing because it means clients have done the due diligence internally, ensured that they’ve got budgets in place, ensured that they sort of manage stakeholders internally and got everything properly lined up to do it.”

The impact of poor pitching practices on agencies has been recognized by the industry for some time. In 2022, the UK’s Institute for Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) promoted the Pitch Positive Pledge, a set of new business guidelines intended to make the process easier for marketers and agency suppliers.

If you’re looking for more advice on how to swerve the cancelled pitch, The Drum Network’s most recent free report might be of use.