The year is still in nappies, and yet there are enough juicy pitches going on to give a new business director a coronary. StarHub in Singapore. DiGi in Malaysia. PSA Citroen in China. Big accounts with big budgets. But while all agree that pitches are what keep the industry moving, there is a creeping suspicion that Asia’s pitch frenzy has reached unhealthy proportions. Have agencies become addicted to pitching in their pursuit of growth?
David Tang is the first to admit to being a pitch fanatic. The DDB Singapore president and CEO spent his Christmas “break” planning his attack on a US$3.5 million brief for the Health Promotion Board. He led 26 pitches last year, and expects to contest 30 over the next 12 months.
“Do we pitch more than we should? Probably,” he says. “But pitching is more than just about the money. We do it because of a desire to find the right kind of client. And we do it to explore new ways of tackling a client’s problems.”
Win or lose, there’s no better way of seeing what your young talent can do than unleashing them on a pitch, adds Tang. And size isn’t everything. “Some agencies are mandated to go for big regional pitches and ignore the small ones. I take issue with this. When you lock horns over the right sort of client it can open you up creatively. Which is why a strong pitching culture is so important.”
Chris Thomas, BBDO’s Asia- Pacific CEO, is more reticent. Agencies shouldn’t pitch unless they believe they have a genuine chance of winning, he argues. “If you pitch a lot and lose, you drain precious resources, you tire and you lose confidence. I have seen it happen. Yes, pitches can be a galvanising force, but I’m a great believer in being selective,” he says.
Ideally, agencies should be looking to avoid pitching altogether, argues Mike Amour, chairman and CEO of Grey Asia-Pacific. “There is no healthier way to grow than with existing business,” he says. “And obsessive pitching can mean taking your eye off your current clients. No wonder relationships are shorter than they used to be.”
Nowhere else is this more pronounced than in China. According to R3, the average client-agency tenure lasts two-and-half years here, compared to over six years in the US and Europe.
“There’s nowhere where relationships are shorter than in China,” says Greg Paull, R3’s principal. High staff turnover for both agencies and clients and a pressure to perform, combined with a low tolerance of failure, are partly to blame.
It doesn’t help, he says, that the pitching process in China, and Asia in general, is geared towards the short-term. As a result, even agencies that want to stay focused on existing clients - most often their best source of revenue - find themselves unwillingly dragged into the competitive fray.
Part of the problem lies with the clients themselves. Experienced multinational brand owners tend to focus more on the long-term than local companies hungry for a quick buck.But agencies cannot rely on international business alone, says Steven Koh, director, Diamond Ogilvy Group.
“We consider our global clients as pillars that we should sustain and nurture,” he says. “However, we cannot be skewed only towards global clients. Regional or global account shifts could prove disastrous.”
Both clients and agencies have work to do to strengthen their ties, argue’s R3’s Paull. “Clients need to better align their senior people with the marketing department, and agencies need to manage their cost structures better,” he says. “The smart agencies have opened horizontal and vertical offerings to capture more marketing revenue from existing clients.”
