TrinityP3 puts pressure on marketers to improve pitching process with new framework
TrinityP3 has launched a new framework designed to help marketers run better pitches, arguing the current process is flawed and “reinforces the status quo when we don’t live in a status quo world”.
What has become clear to the pitch consultancy in recent years is the lack of resources and flawed processes in marketer or procurement-led pitches. Brands are pitching when it might not be necessary and they aren’t adapting to embrace how the marketing world has changed.
“The vast majority of pitches are being run by marketers, and when we started to ask and look around, we saw there’s not a lot of resources that allow them to keep up to date with where pitching needs to be,” Darren Woolley, global CEO of TrinityP3, told Mumbrella.
“The fun has disappeared out of pitching because it’s become more of an administrative process, so BetterPitch isn’t about reframing what the pitch actually means, it’s about putting a framework in place, a philosophy that allows you to start off with what you are trying to achieve, then building a process that actually helps you deliver that.”
Darren Woolley
The initiative includes a suite of free tools for marketers, to assess their agency relationships and prepare them to go to market.
The first is a checklist, which Woolley said will help marketers determine if a pitch is really necessary.
“A lot of people go to pitch just because they think they have to every two or three years,” he said. “And it’s almost self-defeating because the pitch is incredibly disruptive for both the marketer and agencies involved. It can potentially be counterproductive if you end up with a new agency when you didn’t necessarily need one.”
He described the checklist as a “good way of sense checking”.
The BetterPitch initiative also includes ad cost and pitch cost checkers, to benchmark agency costs and estimate the financial and time commitments involved in pitching.
“It will give marketers an insight into what the cost is to agencies participating in the pitch, what the overall cost to the industry is, and we’re hoping that will make marketers pause to consider how they can run pitches so they are less wasteful,” Woolley said.
He said the focus is on changing something that is seen as a harm or hindrance on the industry, but that can only be done by marketers.
“Because we know from the research that the vast majority of pitches are run by marketers, and that’s where most of the pain is being suffered. I’m not saying pitch consultants are perfect by any means, but anything we can do to help marketers run a better pitch has to be good for the industry.
“Change will only happen when marketers start to see that there are other ways of running pitches, rather than the way they’ve always done it,” he said.
“We can’t keep running pitches the way they’ve always been run, just because they’ve been run that way. The marketing world is so much more complicated than it was even ten years ago, so the pitch has to evolve and has to change going forward to actually embrace that.”
He said the current process just “reinforces the status quo, but the trouble is that we don’t live in a status quo world”. Things are changing all the time.
The initiative launch coincides with the opening of its annual State of the Pitch survey.
Now in its third year, the survey invites agencies of all sizes to share their experiences and insights on the pitching process.
Key findings from last year’s report included the involvement of CEOs in the later stages of a pitch — which would often make it restart entirely — as well as the ethics of the process.
“The process was deceptive, as the only thing that mattered was a pre-existing relationship,” one respondent said last year. “I won’t ever be doing business with them again and will be blacklisting all senior executives and procurement so that I never encounter them again. It is wholly unacceptable, deceptive, and unethical.”
TrinityP3 has begun rolling out the survey across other markets including Canada and the US, and it will soon enter Germany, to better understand if similar pains are felt in global markets.
“Hopefully as we roll this out globally, we’ll start to see where the common struggles are or the common issues, but also start to get insights into which markets have actually found ways of solving that. And then share that globally so that we can improve it,” Woolley said.
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Whilst I broadly agree with the intent here, there’s a serious point, at the core of this that we need to address, namely.
‘The fun’s gone out of pitching’.
This isn’t the Mad Men era, it’s people’s livelihoods on the line. A poorly run pitch doesn’t just bruise egos or spoil awards nights; it leads to redundancies, wipes out long service leave, slashes incomes, and dismantles entire agency cultures.
Spare me the sob story that its marketers are truly the point at which the pain is felt. They’re the cause.
Discuss!
This is great, Darren – and so necessary to create a sustainable and thriving industry.
Interested to learn more about the BetterPitch framework.