At the Northern Planning Summit last Thursday night in Sheffield we ended up discussing what would you chose not to pitch for as an agency?, which encompassed wider issues like are they flogging booze/sub-prime finance/fags/politics (delete according to where you draw the line) and are they likely to turn into the client from hell?

Which made me think alot about Pitching on the drive home.  I must easily spend half my time at work on New Business and it seems to me that agencies are increasingly dancing to the client’s tune and agreeing to pitch for accounts or even short-term projects where the odds are what bookmakers would euphemistically refer to as “a long shot”.

It would take a very brave agency MD to make a stand and refuse to pitch for anything, but perhaps if we were all a bit more bolshy and treated the pitch process as more of a two-way interview, we might end up only actually full-blown pitching for those accounts which we were sure that client and agency were a good match – and therefore more likely to produce a successful pitch outcome.