These four words will sink a designer’s heart in a competitive pitch brief.
Why? Not just because of the risk and effort involved but the lack of opportunity it presents to fully understand the problem and find the right solution for the business.
We’ve all read a brief that goes a bit like this:
We invite you (everyone) to present full creative to a brief we wrote yesterday with no business strategy or audience insight. You will each have 30 minutes to present to a boardroom of disinterested people tomorrow.
In my time, I’ve received a few invitations to tender from private and public sector procurement frameworks. They have one thing in common; they ask to see concepts and visuals for their outlined solution. We understand why the boss framed the issue; everyone wants to see something new and exciting.
It couldn’t be more counterproductive.
Even more frustratingly, procurement rules mean you don’t always get to meet their team and talk directly about business needs and what they are trying to achieve. Instead, you are given scores of poorly formatted word documents to respond to.
Design is a process, and ‘look and feel’ is the final part of that process. It involves more than just a designer’s interpretation of a client brief.
Boo hoo, you say, that’s just how it is. You must knuckle down and show a complete design if you want the work. This is how it’s done. So if you’re lucky, the client loves and buys the design. So you build it, and they put their content into it.
It gets invoiced. Job done.
Sit back and wait for the shit to hit the fan.
The result is often the same for this approach. You get an immediate spike in traffic, then it plateaus. Conversions and sales stay the same or drop. Your client asks you to meet with their MD to explain why it didn't achieve what was promised.
You bemoan the budget, and the agency gets fired.
Everybody blames the designer, and the whole process begins again.
Can we fix this and make it fairer?
Instead of going through this long and expensive beauty parade, could you shortlist agencies based on credentials and invite them to a workshop with you instead?
That way, you don’t lose valuable in-house resources to countless internal meetings and endless documentation. Instead, nobody has to jump through the fiery hoops of a procurement process designed to cover arses rather than inspire creativity.
You get to test the knowledge of the agency people as they work with you to define the problem and find a more creative plan (and responsible budget) for solving it.
It's the best way to dodge the Hippo trap.
The project becomes less about technology or showcasing the newest or coolest design techniques and more about delivering an approach that will fit your audience and business needs.
You’ll know who the winning agency is before they all spend countless hours of non-billable time and upheaval on directionless design. But, more importantly, you get to know what they are like to work with as people.
This must be preferable to getting the correct answer to the wrong question?
Until then.
I’ll keep saying no to presenting full creative. I prefer to explain my approach and provide some meaningful insight. It isn’t always a pitch-winning strategy, but maybe I’ve dodged a bullet?
More thoughts on this.
The industry isn’t short on articles about free pitching, but it looks like the IPA is the only industry body that has taken the lead with guidelines on pitching. So maybe we should use them or have a similar code of practice for digital agencies and procurement frameworks?