Who is left standing if all your agencies are paying to play?
Opinion
What does it say about confidence in our industry that we still have to give marketers guidance about how to run fair pitch processes?
“Daddy, why is there a rainbow on the wall?”
A typically great question that my five-year-old daughter asked after seeing a sunbeam bouncing off a picture frame and having its white light split apart all over the wall, like a unicorn went splat into the living room.
I told her it was like baking: eggs, flour, milk, sugar, butter — all different ingredients that come together to make something new. A rainbow is the same: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet mix together to make white light.
Then she demanded cake, so I’m not sure the science stuck.
But the point is: almost anything complicated can be broken down into its ingredients. Even the things that feel opaque — quantum mechanics or the movie Tenet — become easier to understand if you split them into their parts.
Take the business of pay-to-play pitch consultants — a process agencies have complained about privately for years.
Let’s use our mental prism to tackle this old chestnut: why can’t this industry get its act together over pitching?
Isba encourages greater transparency in pitch consultant selection
Questions for advertisers
Take the issue of “pay to play”: where agencies are induced to pay fees to intermediaries for privileged access for pitches.
The moment a consultant takes money from the supply side and advises the buy side, it has crossed a line. It’s not impartial or objective. It’s not even subtle!
VoxComm has warned this practice is growing and the damage is obvious: agencies that don’t — or can’t — pay are sidelined. Not because they’re bad, but because they refused to pay to play.
Last week’s launch of Isba’s Pitch Consultant Guide seems like a welcome attempt to bring transparency to this murky corner of the market. It sets out the different commercial models — agency-funded, client-funded, win fees and, yes, pay-to-play listings — and gives marketers the questions they should be asking before appointing anyone:
• Do you take money from agencies?
• How do you guarantee impartiality?
• What exactly are we paying you for?
This is a great breakdown of what “pay to play” entails. Simple questions to help answer a complicated problem. But unless advertisers actually use this guide behind closed doors, during real commercial negotiations, it won’t change a thing.
And it’s hard to ignore the bigger question: what took us so long? Adweek was flagging these practices as far back as 2009.
Pay-to-play pitches risk ‘fair competition’, trade body warns
Do marketers actually care?
Of course, most marketers say they care about transparency, access to diverse talent and fair competition.
But if they’re knowingly working with consultants who exclude agencies based on who’s paying, then we have to ask: do they really?
There’s some evidence they do. Marketers insist, when polled by Isba’s US counterpart the Association of National Advertisers and the American Association of Advertising Agencies, that they rank trust among the top factors for successful agency relationships.
But when it comes to pitch consultants, there’s a strange silence. Maybe marketers assume the process is clean. Maybe they trust the consultant too much. Or maybe (and this is the part no-one wants to admit) they prefer it this way.
Pay-to-play processes give the illusion of control: they streamline the chaos of sorting through all these different agencies (now more than 25,000 of them in the UK alone).
An easy life is always attractive. But “easy” shouldn’t mean excluding brilliant agencies that might not have the resources (and, dare I say, moral flexibility) to “pay to play”.
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The cost of free
Agencies, for their part, are to blame by educating advertisers over many years that they can have a lot of stuff for free.
The “pitch” can often descend into a desperate game of seeing how much you can give away for free. Strategic thinking. Creative ideas. Commercial insight. All handed over during the pitch process with no guarantee of compensation, no rights protection and no expectation of commitment.
Creative agencies could always claw it back through the cost of producing the ads. Media had commission fees and deals with media owners.
But these practices are breaking down, as evidenced so sharply last week with WPP’s grave earnings report and the Omnicom takeover of Interpublic being approved. Holding companies face managing decline or radical transformation.
Part of that radicalism should mean that agencies no longer rationalise giveaways as the cost of competing for new business. It’s value leakage on a massive scale; one that erodes morale and inflates workloads.
Plus, where a client takes an idea from a losing agency and runs with it, it’s downright theft.
The excuse is always the same: pitches drive innovation, competition, better work. And that can be true if the process is fair, the brief is clear and the client is genuinely committed. Procurement can be the talented guide that ensures parity and process, rallying decision-makers and mediating fairly.
But when clients fudge the brief or fail to align internally, procurement can’t fix the fundamentals. Because the real issue isn’t procurement dumbly treating marketing expenses like buying office chairs; it’s whether clients are structuring their pitch process to suit the task and attract the talent their business deserves.
Curation and outcomes: Step in the right direction or another false dawn?
Size matters
The stakes go far beyond agencies and their intermediaries.
It’s easy — maybe even fashionable — for people outside our industry to dismiss advertising as irrelevant, with such an array of quality ad-free subscription products. The open web can seem like a digital landfill and most ads are ignorable at best, malicious at worst.
But, despite all that, advertising still works. It’s always been slippery to explain exactly how and why — but the evidence is there: good advertising helps businesses grow and funds quality media.
Advertising underwrites culture. It’s the economic engine behind a lot of things we value — and far too many of us take for granted.
A great advertising campaign once used two words to describe this: “Reassuringly expensive.” Why do so many in our industry not believe what any wise grandparent would tell them: you get what you pay for?
We need the best companies to succeed — not the ones that can pay most to play most.
Omar Oakes was founding editor of The Media Leader and continues to write a column as a freelance journalist and communications consultant for advertising and media companies. He has reported on advertising and media for 10 years and was previously media and tech editor of Campaign. His column on The Media Leader was nominated for the BSME’s B2B Column of the Year in 2024.