#90: APR's Patrick Lafferty on the changing economics of advertising production

On WPP's earnings call last week, Cindy Rose kind of took a swipe, if you will, at the pitchless CEO handshake wins, saying they kind of encourage clients to bypass due diligence.

And then making headlines this week, publicists put out a post starting with kind of Dear Cindy and talked about how if you skip an old school pitch circus, it isn't necessarily skipping the due diligence process.

I'm curious if you could expand on outside of that, your experience kind of outside the pitch environment, pitching without reviews.

Do you think this is a real debate or kind of just CEOs scoring points, if you will?

Pitchers can be done very well and pitches can be done not well.

And I think the process is a big part of that.

And I've been a part of, prior to this, I've led several agencies and I've had pitches where we were 12 months pitching and doing lots of free work through that 12 month process.

And I've had very short kind of reviews, if you will, single bid.

So I believe it depends on what the client wants and then setting up a pitch process that match what they want to come when they want to get to.

I think the biggest problem with pitching that always needs to be addressed is what is it that the client wants? What is it that the brand wants? And being really clear on that brief.

And then getting help, I would say, and preferably, I think, getting some outside help from experts on, okay, if this is what you want, here are the ways that you can go about finding that in the marketplace.

And there could be a situation where it doesn't make sense or it makes more sense to go direct to someone because they have a particular expertise or capability that is so dead on what that client is looking for.

that don't waste everyone's time and you know pretend to do a competitive thing if this is what you want and there's a provider that can do it exceptionally well then okay i think in general i would say you want a competitive review but i wouldn't say it's the answer to everything

Well, the situation makes me wonder what happened in place of a competitive review, because interestingly, Artur takes pains to specifically say, hey, this was not just a handshake deal.

You should know that in his note.

And so, you know, obviously something was going on behind the scenes and it makes me wonder, OK, what's what's the new anti-pitch pitch process look like?

I think it's still a pitch in that the agency or entity or combination of agencies has to present their capabilities, has to answer the client questions, has to prove that they have done something similar before and that could help them.

So I think the steps there that you would go through would often be similar.

It just would be you're doing it as a singular entity as opposed to multiple entities.

At least that would be my expectation if I was sitting in the client's shoes.

You've got to prove to me still that you are the best choice for us to do this.

And I want to see that you've done stuff like this before, that you understand what I'm asking you to do, and that you're being smart and competitive in how you're laying it out and how you're pricing it.

So I would assume that they're not skipping those steps.

Yeah.

Olivier, in your experience throughout the agency land, have you seen pre-tools really protect clients or are you seeing similar concerns?