Will adland ditch the pitch? Part 2: Setting fire to burn out culture
A month ago, Mat Baxter asked the industry to join him in ditching the pitch. In this series, Mumbrella’s Brittney Rigby takes that challenge to a range of media agency bosses. Part 2 sees industry leaders look inwards: is pitching contributing to their agency’s burn and churn rates?
Media agencies are being confronted by an increasing volume of client demands that are also increasingly unreasonable, according to Mat Baxter. And those demands include the expectation that pitches will run over holiday periods, which, says Initiative’s global CEO, “adds to the culture-killing nature of working in agencies and increases the churn rate because people get burned out and feel that they don’t get the time to rest and recharge”.
Then there’s the sheer manpower required to pull off a pitch, the intensity, the pressure to go above and beyond to outshine competitors and ensure the resource drain results in actually winning the account.
“So again, it impacts clients negatively because clients constantly have staff churn on their accounts because the culture of the agency is getting impacted,” Baxter claims.
Hey guys, could you please please pretty please start a section across both your AU & Asia platforms (perhaps a regional one) for agency leads to submit RFPs that are unreasonable & flag out clients who are unscrupulous (ie. doesn’t pay, steals ideas etc)? You could gate it so only agencies who register with their work email can make these submissions – but it gets online & viewable as anonymous entries.
Honestly we need a platform like this as it’s truly getting mad. I’ve recently received a ANZ proposal that asked for specific revenue breakdown of the agency – why do they even need to know that? Blackberry’s latest RFP also clearly states that that they “can use without limitation or liability any and/or all ideas from the proposals” without engaging any agency.
Do this – and we’ll all love you even more than ever. Please?