Agency leaders should feel confident to drop out of ‘disappointing’ pitches: Dan Monheit
During a period of increased pitches, particularly high profile ones, Hardhat CEO Dan Monheit has warned others agency leaders that they need to be confident to pull out of them if they don’t feel right.
As agencies compete hard for new business in an increasingly challenging economy, Monheit has suggested there has been increasingly questionable behaviour from clients who might underestimate the magnitude of effort and energy that goes into the pitch process.
“As long as there are agencies hungry for work, and there are clients with work, pitching will be here forever. But, I think the thing we often tend to forget as agencies is that if we don’t like how things are going, we don’t have to go,” Monheit told Mumbrella.
“There was one unpaid pitch that stipulated in the NDA that the client owned everything that we presented,” Monheit said, describing one of the more extreme examples.
Speaking from significant experience (50+ new business pitches in the past few years alone of various scale), the demand that all IP is owned by the client (regardless of whether you win the pitch or not) is not new and certainly not extreme.
To echo Dan’s point, it completely devalues the work we produce and further reinforces the cost vs. value dichotomy that procurement-led pitches increasingly focus on.
As an aside, for those companies that do pitch, they wax lyrical about their anti-slavery positions and statements, and yet are hypocritical in their treatment of, and expectation of pitching agencies, expecting at worse, indentured servitude and at best down right IP theft.
It’s not that clients don’t understand the cost of a pitch for an agency- they really don’t care. Too many marketing execs in Australia get there by playing a 3-year shell game. They only know how to run a pitch – wouldn’t have a clue how to build and brand and grow a business.
As Bill Bernbach said many moons ago: “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you something”.
Clients frequently do steal valuable ideas from pitches. I know this from personal experience. The ‘middle management right to steal’ has to be stopped, and the very notion that a client should own unearned IP is shameful.