Why Most Agency New Business Wastes Creative Energy
Agency pitches often become performances—elaborate decks and ideas—focused on impressing rather than showcasing creativity, strategy, and capability.
The pattern is familiar: teams invest much creative effort in pitches that rarely succeed, misrepresent the agency, and exhaust all. This is the pitch theatre problem. When new business becomes a spectacle instead of a conversation, agencies prioritize drama over fit, harming creativity.
The issue isn't pitching itself. It's how the process has drifted from reality, wasting talent and distorting relationships before they even begin.
The modern agency pitch didn't start as theatre. It evolved into it.
Pitches in the 1960s and 70s were straightforward—strategy talks supported by credentials. As competition grew and procurement got involved, the stakes rose. Clients demanded more detailed demos, prompting agencies to escalate their efforts.
By the 2000s, the pitch became a multi-round tournament. Currently, agencies develop campaign ideas without access to proprietary data, customer insights, or business intelligence, leading to impressive but potentially ineffective campaigns.
The "big idea" reveal became optimised for wow, not viability. Pitches evolved into theatrical unveilings designed to elicit emotional responses rather than demonstrate how strategy actually gets developed and tested. Timelines compressed to absurdity. Three weeks to develop a comprehensive brand strategy and creative platforms for companies you've never worked with became standard practice—bearing no resemblance to how real strategic work unfolds.
The work itself got optimised for winning rooms rather than building brands. Agencies learned to deliver what impresses procurement committees and CMOs in sixty-minute windows, which isn't always what creates sustained value.
By 2025, the scale is clear: 86% of agencies view free idea giveaways in pitches as fundamentally problematic, with many calling the process "no longer fit for purpose." Non-incumbent agencies invest an average of $200,000 per major pitch. Brands spend roughly $400,000 running the process. Pitches reward theatre because theatre feels decisive—even when it isn't.
The conversation about agency pitches typically centres on win rates and business development ROI. The human cost gets discussed far less.
Senior talent is diverted from client work during pitches, with leaders spending 30-40% of their time on new business. This reduces focus on current clients and deepening existing relationships.
Win rates for competitive pitches are around 22-25% industry-wide. Three out of four major pitches fail after weeks of effort. This creates a demoralising cycle for stretched teams: invest heavily, lose, recover briefly, then repeat. Surveys show 70-80% of agency professionals experience burnout, with pitch pressure a key factor.
Agencies giving away weeks of strategic and creative work for free imply this work has no inherent value, only worth if it leads to a sale. Talented creatives internalise this, affecting how they view their contributions and their decision to stay.
The pattern compounds. Pitch demands consistently fall on the same people—those who can deliver under impossible timelines. One creative director put it plainly: "We punish our rock stars because they're good. They're the ones who burn out first."
Industry analysis shows 34% of agency reviews now conclude with no decision, a delay, or a request to re-pitch. Teams invest everything, then face ambiguity or silence. The industry talks constantly about creative burnout. Pitch theatre is one of its least examined sources.
Agencies' tactics to win pitches don't necessarily lead to successful client relationships.
Spec work and polished presentations hide how teams collaborate under pressure—handling surprises, conflicting feedback, or messy campaign middle. The pitch shows a choreographed agency, not how they navigate client pushback, disagreements, or new stakeholders.
Pitch concepts are built on assumptions and secondary research. Client work requires constant adaptation as you learn what actually resonates. The ability to pivot based on evidence matters far more than the ability to guess correctly upfront, yet pitches reward the illusion of certainty over the honesty of exploration.
The pitch process is carefully controlled. Real partnerships require collaborative decision-making where agency and client work through options together, weighing trade-offs in real time. Pitches present finished thinking. Client relationships are built on shared discovery.
The campaign that wins the pitch is rarely the campaign that ultimately runs. Smart agencies know great work emerges through iteration, testing, and refinement—not dramatic reveals.
The data bears this out: 47% of client-agency relationships beginning with competitive pitches end within two years, significantly higher than relationships that start through other methods. The pitch may have been won, but the partnership was built on false premises.
Pitch theatre doesn't just harm agencies. It sets clients up for disappointment.
Clients buy a moment, not a method. The pitch showcases the A-team delivering polished thinking. Daily interactions involve different people, pacing, and finish levels. Clients enamoured with the pitch may feel misled when reality differs.
To win, agencies often present ideas as more complete and definitive than they actually are, creating expectations that strategic direction is settled. In reality, the best work requires ongoing discovery. Clients get frustrated when the agency wants to revisit what seemed like finished thinking.
The pitch encourages agencies to hide uncertainty, downplay challenges, and appear confident. This creates a tone that makes vulnerable conversations harder—admitting issues, acknowledging gaps, and asking for help. The relationship begins with performance rather than honesty that truly advances work.
Many pitch processes are designed by procurement to optimize risk mitigation and cost efficiency. While legitimate concerns, they often hinder creative excellence by demanding detailed timelines before understanding the problem, requiring multiple agencies for the same brief, and judging based on compliance rather than insight.
Smart clients are recognising this. Marketing leaders at companies like Patagonia have publicly abandoned traditional pitch processes, arguing they waste time and produce worse outcomes for everyone involved.
The healthiest growth strategies shift from persuasion to discovery.
The best agency-client relationships begin with mutual effort to assess fit, not convincing each other. It requires vulnerability: clients sharing challenges and constraints, and agencies being honest about capabilities.
Before discussing solutions, ensure everyone understands the problem the same way. Many pitches skip this, with agencies solving the brief without questioning if it asks the right question. The most valuable agencies help clients understand their challenges more clearly.
Instead of presenting work as fully formed, show the thinking behind it. Explain your assumptions, considered alternatives, and what you'd want to test. This transparency builds trust and sets realistic expectations for development.
Strategic thinking shows up more clearly in conversation than presentation. How does the agency respond to challenging questions? Can they think on their feet? Do they ask smart questions themselves? A working session often reveals more than a polished deck.
Case studies of actual client work—including constraints, challenges, and iterations—provide a better signal than speculative pitches. They show what the agency has actually accomplished, facing real-world limitations, not what they can imagine under artificial conditions.
This approach requires a different confidence. It's easier to hide behind a theatre than to show your actual thinking, imperfections included. But fit matters more than flash.
When agencies step away from pitch theatre, the benefits compound.
Teams focus on meaningful problems. When not preparing for speculative pitches, creative talent can work on projects that ship—solving real challenges for real audiences. This work builds portfolios, skills, and career satisfaction.
Creativity gets applied where it has impact. The best ideas emerge from deep understanding, not quick turnarounds. When creative energy goes into existing client challenges where you have context, data, and relationships, the work improves, and the outcomes strengthen.
Teams not performing for pitches can foster relationships through honest collaboration, shifting culture from impressing to partnering. This influences meeting dynamics, feedback exchange, and confidence in speaking up about issues.
Agencies that pitch more selectively tend to have higher win rates and retain clients longer. Losing 75% of pitches costing $150,000 each is worse than winning 60% of opportunities at $20,000. Relationships strengthen when both sides invest in understanding before committing.
Starting with aligned expectations reduces early turbulence, avoiding unwinding promises made in competition. It fosters shared understanding and builds lasting partnerships.
Innovative agencies are testing models that focus on fit and mutual value.
Instead of weeks of free work, some agencies now offer paid engagements to understand clients' challenges, audit their situation, and develop strategies. This respects both parties' time and provides resources for research. Agencies report conversion rates up to 85%, much higher than traditional pitches. Clients refusing to pay for discovery usually wouldn't value the partnership.
Collaborative workshops involve both teams working on real challenges instead of just the agency presenting to the client. They demonstrate collaboration, feedback flow, and team chemistry. Some agencies hold full-day sessions to map customer journeys, identify opportunities, or test hypotheses.
Many agencies now separate strategic and creative phases. First, demonstrate strategic thinking through conversation and frameworks. Only after alignment on strategy do you explore creative execution. This prevents the common scenario where clients love the creative but disagree with the underlying strategy.
Instead of chasing every RFP, agencies set strict qualification standards. Ask if the budget supports the scope, if the timeline is realistic, if we have relevant experience, and if decision-makers are engaged. If not, decline politely. This approach safeguards the team and boosts pipeline quality.
The best new business processes acknowledge that agency and client teams are comprised of skilled professionals whose time has value. This shows up practically: reasonable timelines, clear decision criteria, prompt feedback, transparency about process and participants.
Not every opportunity should be pursued. That's a strength, not a weakness.
Pitch theatre persists because it serves certain purposes. It creates the feeling of due diligence. It provides cover for difficult decisions. It generates excitement in what might otherwise be a routine procurement.
Agencies face high costs doing meaningful work—wasted energy on dead-end pitches, talent burnout, and misaligned expectations leading to disappointment.
The path forward requires believing that selectivity, contrary to usual wisdom, is strength.
It means confidently declining pitches that don't meet your criteria, even when hungry for growth. It involves showing your real thinking, not just polished output, valuing fit over flash, and partnership over performance.
This isn't anti-growth. It's pro-sustainability. It's choosing to compete on things that actually predict successful relationships rather than things that win theatrical moments.
The agencies making this shift aren't naive about the challenges. Some clients will always want spec work. Some procurement processes can't be changed from the outside. Being selective about pitches means living with more pipeline uncertainty.
They've learned that pitch theatre is a game where even winning often feels like losing. They've chosen to focus on meaningful work, build honest relationships instead of solely performance, and measure growth by their creative impact rather than the number of rooms performed in.
