Why agencies are obsessed with pitching on process instead of talent

The Super Bowl is behind us, Taylor and Travis have their whole lives ahead of them, and anyone who watched the Big Game has forgotten which celebrities shilled for which brands by now. With day-after recall at record lows and media more fragmented than ever, agencies and clients are desperate to find a new way of creating memorable and effective campaigns. And in their desperation, they have turned to geometry. The best and worst Super Bowl ads Ad Age reviews the Big Game commercials Click here A friendly CMO recently shared the final pitch presentations from half a dozen leading agencies, and comparing them side by side was fascinating. All were well-designed, the campaigns polished and strategies solid—in many ways variations on a theme, with a clear underlying pattern that reveals the shape of things to come. Agencies today are selling process, not ideas. And it isn’t clear clients are buying it. Every presentation featured a proprietary process designed by the agency. A custom approach to identify targets, develop campaigns and optimize impact—with every step of the process powered by AI, naturally. And if you didn’t work in the industry, you might actually believe this remarkable process transforms marketing into a science, a disciplined approach with guaranteed outcomes. The key to these one-of-a-kind models is apparently finding the perfect combination of circles, squares, diamonds and triangles. One agency’s process looked like the blueprints to the Starship Enterprise. Arrows abounded and ellipses are replacing circles as the unifying shape of choice among the more fashionable strategists. A consultant from McKinsey or Bain would be intimidated. Euclid would be proud. The only problem is that it’s all bullshit. A blind man could see the creative ideas were not developed via the agency’s so-called process, and anyone who’s ever worked at an agency knows that creativity comes from collaboration, not an assembly line. The brand strategies shared with the client were similar, differentiated by the degree of clarity with which they were presented. Plain language and common sense were the exception, not the rule, and all too often data and analytical charts interrupted a clear narrative. A pitch is a story with a happy ending, but our industry’s obsession with using data to justify every decision often obscures the plot. Any of the campaign ideas presented might have been figured out by a strategist and a copywriter drawing sketches on bar napkins, not because they weren’t insightful, but because human insights come from empathy and common sense, not a machine. If you need to conduct weeks of consumer research to figure out an angle, then you shouldn’t be doing this, you’ll get hurt. Because make no mistake, that is the business we’re in: art as commerce—empathy and ideas. An industry built by creative iconoclasts is suddenly desperate to prove creativity is a mere commodity. So why are agencies tripping over themselves to obfuscate the obvious? As with so many things, the explanation comes down to money. Procurement continues to squeeze agency margins and CMO tenures have shrunk, so cost-cutting agencies decided to jettison much of their senior (and expensive) talent, discarding experienced players who are high on impact in new business but low on time allocation for day-to-day clients. When the hot air balloon that is the modern agency starts running out of steam, it’s the heavyweights who get thrown out of the basket first. This has left inexperienced talent in charge of major accounts, which is why agency-client relationships are more unstable than ever. That rare talent who understands complex categories or big brand platforms has been forced to go freelance, so a pitch comes down to which agency has hired the best mercenary army. Since agencies can’t pitch on borrowed talent, they are pitching process. See all of Ad Age’s 2024 Creativity Award winners here And since most clients can’t differentiate between creative ideas without validation from testing, data has become the collective crutch for an industry governed by fear. Which is ironic, because anyone experienced in new business knows that clients buy a team, and winning agencies are selling chemistry and collaboration. The ability to translate a client’s business challenge into a creative idea—extemporaneously during an unstructured conversation—is a vanishing skill that doesn’t fit inside a circle or a triangle. If a proprietary process really produced foolproof creativity, then every formulaic movie would be a blockbuster, every potboiler novel published by risk-averse editors would become a bestseller and every clichéd pickup line would work in any bar in the world. Instead of friendly competition between creative consultants, pitching has become a bad game of poker between accountants counting cards. I’ll see your circle and raise you two triangles. The problem is the pot in the middle of the card game is getting smaller, and agencies are running out of chips. If the holding companies convince Wall Street they’re in consulting and not the communications business, their stock multiplier goes higher. A win for shareholders but a tragic loss for anyone who still believes business is built by breakthrough ideas. Never forget that clients are holding a pitch because ideas are not a commodity that can be mass-produced. We are engineering our own demise. The quest for a guaranteed hit practically destroyed the movie business, broke the back of the publishing industry and crushed the margins of almost every creative agency left standing. It’s time to reclaim our identity as a creative industry, show some solidarity and charge the premium prices that true intellectual property commands. The outputs of an agency process are incredibly hard to create, no matter how much geometry you use—even throwing an octagon or dodecahedron into the mix won’t be enough to move consumers from apathy to purchase unless you capture their imaginations and get them emotionally engaged. Advertising is something nobody asked for, an unwanted interruption that we all actively avoid, which is why craft matters. Moments that move you, images that stop you in your tracks, poetry that echoes a life that feels like your own. Creativity doesn’t fit in a square or a circle, so let’s get back to thinking outside the box.

Why agencies are obsessed with pitching on process instead of talent

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