My eye was caught by Larry Franks of Beige’s call to agencies to stand up for themselves in this week’s PR Week – coming in the same issue as the Jaguar Academy were criticized for running a PR pitch process, then not choosing anyone, and Ketchum had their Morocco National Tourist Office account cancelled a year early, for what seems like no particular reason.
The idea of a ‘letter of engagement’ binding clients to start paying agencies for work post pitch is certainly an interesting one, which you would hope most reasonable clients wouldn’t object to. Good clients also recognise how time consuming pitch processes are for agencies – tales of clients using pitches for ‘ideas gathering’ are relatively rare, but unfortunately, most people have them; and everyone has stories of pitching for something which turns out to be entirely different (and usually much smaller) once it’s actually in the door.
Mutual client/ agency respect is vital for a good working relationship, and no-one wants to get off to a bad start. Everyone knows that some work will need to be done post pitch to get a programme right, but expecting large amounts of this for free, or substantially changing the brief can make things difficult, just as it turning out the agency don’t have the staff to undertake the work or haven’t costed correctly is no doubt just as frustrating for clients.
Of course, we all know that times are tough, and sympathise with the fact that many clients are facing budget cuts outside of their control and delays and changes that frustrate them too. But Beige are right to take a stand – as long as agencies continue to have no come-back, and let themselves be taken advantage of, there will be a small minority of unscrupulous or just badly organized clients who will take advantage of agency tendencies to bend over backwards to get them signed up. My guess is that these will also go on to be the clients who are the most overserviced, and the most likely to repitch at short notice and leave you anyway. Setting boundaries from the start has to be a sensible approach and the more of us that do it, the stronger the industry will be.
