If you work in an agency, or if you lead marketing on the client side, you already know the uncomfortable reality: at some point in your career, you will go through a pitch process. And it will suck!
What was once an occasional, strategic tool for agency selection has metastasized into a routine corporate ritual. Pitching has become so prevalent across our industry that we have stopped questioning its premise. But we have to confront the quiet truth: the modern agency pitch process is fundamentally broken.
It burns out top creative talent, destroys agency margins, compromises brand consistency, and fails to deliver the commercial returns promised to executive leadership.
To fix this cycle, we have to look past the industry theatre, diagnose why we pitch so relentlessly, and examine why nobody truly wins during these corporate Hunger Games.
The Root Cause: A Crisis of Confidence
Why do businesses pitch so often? The root cause is not a hunger for better creative thinking; it is a profound lack of commercial confidence.
The CEO Trust Deficit: In a benchmark study of over 1,200 CEOs conducted by The Fournaise Marketing Group, 80% of CEOs stated they do not trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs. Even more damning, 73% of CEOs stated that marketing as a discipline lacks commercial credibility.
The CFO ROI Scepticism: The executives controlling the purse strings are equally unconvinced, with 72% of CFOs stating they do not believe marketing drives a sufficient return on investment.
The Expense Mindset: This means, the suits in the boardroom views marketing not as an enterprise growth engine but as an unproven overhead, the reflex in a tightening economy is simple, but brutal and that is to manage it, cut it, and squeeze suppliers into submission.
The procurement mandate arrives, and the pitching process commences.
Welcome to the Hunger Games where NOBODY Wins
A typical pitch involves the incumbent agency plus approximately three challengers vying for the business. Each agency is handed a complex, live commercial brief to solve. While procurement scorecards include various qualitative criteria to make it all seem fair and legit. If you’ve been in the FMCG marketing industry for as long as I have (two decades) you know the awkward truth: cost is almost invariably the deciding factor.
So agencies don’t have a choice and are forced to enter the hunger games but stepping into this arena triggers a downward spiral for everyone involved.
Part 1: The Agency Reality (Four Structural Losses)
Unpaid Speculative Labour: Agencies invest massive amounts of time, senior resource, and hard cash to participate. Most pitches are entirely unpaid. In a four-way pitch, an agency faces a 75% statistical probability of losing, yet gives away its best thinking completely for free.
Crushing Opportunity Cost: Every non-billable hour poured into speculative pitch work is an hour stolen from paying clients who actually fund the agency's payroll.
A diabolical Intellectual Property Trap: Even when an agency loses, its ideas remain in the client's memory. Far too often, distinctive campaign concepts presented during unpaid pitches find their way into the market two years later under the winning agency, picking up awards while the originating team receives nothing.
The Winner's Curse: Winning a cost-driven pitch is often worse than losing. Driven by margin pressure, agencies sign up to unsustainably low retainer fees and/or rates. To survive, leadership cannot afford top tier talent, leading to bait-and-switch staffing, junior account teams, and relentless cross selling and upselling just to recover basic operational margins. The result is volatility, high staff turnover, and agency leadership constantly intervening just to calm the farm.
Part 2: Client Illusion (A Hidden Commercial Toll)
Clients assume they secured a bargain, locked in free ideas, and injected fresh thinking into the business. In practice, they inherit systemic friction:
Brand Disruption and Inconsistency: New agencies inevitably want to make their mark. They discard established distinctive brand assets and strategic positioning to justify their appointment, resetting years of accumulated mental availability.
An inevitable Two-Year "Storming" Phase: Like any high-stakes relationship, onboarding a new agency requires extensive behavioural alignment. Teams spend 12 to 24 months navigating internal politics, codifying ways of working, and resolving conflict.
The ROI Collapse: By the time the agency and client finally reach operational rhythm, the three-year contract is up, and procurement mandates the next pitch cycle. Because strategic consistency was sacrificed for short-term cost savings, campaigns fail to move the P&L, CEO distrust deepens, and the downward spiral accelerates.
Fractional Fallout: A Warning for the Industry
This systemic dysfunction has exacted a severe toll on marketing careers over the past two decades and we have all seen or felt this first-hand.
Across the corporate economy, 30.4% of all fractional executives are in marketing. Compare that to just 8.8% in HR and 7.6% in Finance. Yikes…
While fractional work offers autonomy, this stark disparity proves that companies increasingly view marketing leadership as an episodic luxury to be rented and discarded rather than a permanent operational pillar. Relentless pitching and margin compression have hollowed out agency stability, pushing exceptional senior practitioners out of the traditional system altogether.
The Make Marketing Better Playbook: 4 Principles to Restore Agency Partnerships
Reversing this decline requires shifting from transactional procurement back to commercial partnership.
1. Mandate an 80% Reduction in Pitch Volumes
Pitches should be rare, high-friction events reserved strictly for unavoidable circumstances: catastrophic relationship breakdown, ethical violations, or unresolvable commercial conflicts of interest. Pitching must never be used as a routine benchmarking tool or cost-cutting exercise. Halting the pitch carousel restores immediate operational stability to both sides.
2. Rebuild Sustainable Commercial Business Models
Clients must treat agencies as vital commercial partners, not dispensable vendors. We should look back at the enduring principles of the 1960s model, where creative and media strategy were aligned, and agencies were compensated with predictable revenue streams that enabled proper staffing and long-term planning. When agencies have healthy margins, they do not need to manufacture unnecessary tactical busywork to stay solvent.
3. Align Remuneration with Long-Term Enterprise Growth
Short-term election cycles breed short-term tactics. When agencies know they are secure for the long haul, discussions shift from hourly rate cards to compounding brand equity. Structuring remuneration around long-term business performance and market share growth aligns agency incentives directly with the CEO's objectives.
4. Replace pitches with paid work
The simplest solution however is to simply replace all pitches with paid work. I.e. do due diligence, find an agency with credentials you like and give them a paid brief to execute. This will give a client the best possible way to evaluate that agency and it will ensure fair pay for fair work. SIMPLE.
The Commercial Partnership Charter
To build partnerships that drive genuine enterprise value, marketing leaders and agencies must operate under a simple charter:
End speculative exploitation: Stop asking agencies to solve real business problems for free. Respect intellectual property and compensate strategic work.
Protect brand consistency over novelty: Recognize that changing agencies every three years destroys distinctive brand assets and resets category mental availability.
Demand skin in the game: Tie agency compensation to verified commercial outcomes and P&L performance, not vanity metrics and creative trophies.
Build for decades, not months: The most commercially successful brands in history maintain agency partnerships that span decades. Long-term trust compounds value; constant pitching destroys it.
Marketing only gets better when we build commercially viable relationships. Kill the Hunger Games, respect the craft, and demand the commercial rigor required to drive enduring business growth.
Written by James Deysel
23 October 2026
James Deysel is the founder of Make Marketing Better, author of Limitless LinkedIn, and an FMCG marketing advisor helping brands bridge the gap between creative strategy and commercial performance.
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