How is agency pitching any different to online dating?

You are an organisation achieving great things and you need a media partner because you have a campaign in mind.  The established practice is to create a brief, pick three agencies blindly from the internet, email your brief and sit back and wait for the responses.

For someone who has never internet dated, this sounds a lot like Tinder to me.  Create a profile.  Photoshop if you need to, leave out a few things about yourself and accentuate some other things about yourself, and hope your future lovers don’t do the same.

The problem with this industry wide practice of pitching, is that you don’t know who you are getting.  It really is potentially the start of a bad relationship, because you don’t know each other’s values.

The agencies you pick will madly create the best concepts possible, but maybe that’s all they’re good at?  What’s their bedside manner like?  What are their problem-solving skills like?  How are they under pressure?  Who are the soldiers behind the top-level talent that you’ve met?

In being pitched to you are really internet dating.  You’re getting the agencies glossy, puffed-up version of themselves but is it who they really are?

It can be a very on the surface, fake, transaction.  Even more so if you haven’t allowed phone calls or meetings prior and you’ve given a 5-day deadline.  I think it’s the industry at its worst.  How you start relationships is usually how they’re conducted.  I think clients like the aspect of having complete control.  Agencies are excited about the opportunity, but they begrudge being treated like a commodity.

Here’s another way to choose an agency.  Instead of seeing agencies as operatives you need to recruit, contract and dispatch, why don’t you look at it as a partnership?

Start with values.  When you’re not under deadline or campaign pressure that’s the time to find your ideal agency.  Take your time.  Interview the owners and staff.  See if you’re a values match.  Work on something small and non-consequential together.  Getting a great outcome is probably much easier than finding the right match.  The best relationships are forged in the fire of solving problems and navigating the unknown together.  How are you testing for that in the pitching process?  You’re not.  You’re totally absorbed in your dream campaign, you’re not examining at all for the qualities, processes and systems essential for execution under pressure in a changing environment.

The pitch is the glossy outcome, created without market pressure, without live bullets and without you getting to know the agency at all.

If the campaign is so important, I’d be looking beyond the glossy pitch and into the hearts and minds and business systems of your potential new partner.  At GTM we’re Champions of Change and we tell Stories That Change Lives.  We believe in taking responsibility, talking to each other not about each other, having a growth mindset and making it happen for the client.

A very successful 80-plus year-old entrepreneur friend of mine slaps down his own psychometric test on the table before he gets into any new relationships.  And he asks the potential partner to do the same.  He builds bridges and roads, but that’s the easy bit.

Finding the right partner, takes a lot more effort.