November 12, 2006

New Business Pitch

For those who also work for advertising agencies, how many of you like new business pitch? To some extent, it is free market consultation and creative giveaway to the prospects -- all at the expense of the agencies.

I work for a small agency. I must admit all the pitches we have recently have been taking a good portion of my time from existing clients who are no less valuable. Yet, who can afford not to pitch?

I should be happy that there are so many multicultural pitches going on. It means marketers understand the importance of multicultural marketing and they demand specialty boutiques to deliver.

In some pitches, prospects review agencies of different ethnicity separately -– which most of the time include African American, Hispanic and Asian marketing agencies. Some others would ask the agencies to group together to present and award the business to the winning team.

Marketers (mostly government services) prefer the latter approach may be because they are too busy and have no time to review dozens agencies and presentations (three to four from each segment). They may also want to make sure the selected agencies can work together as one team. I personally do not like the team pitch at all. Most of time, it limits our creativities (since we are not the leading agency).

It's your call: Easier review or deeper understand of the agencies?


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