Who wins when companies free pitch?

For clients, the prospect of getting 3,4 (or more!) 'ideas' before signing a contract seems a great prospect. In addition to the benefit of being able to compare a company's response to the brief it also offers the obvious benefit of being able to take forward a more informed picture of what you're wanting to achieve when you finally sign that cheque. In addition, when chatting to our clients as to why they feel concept work is beneficial to them, several came back with the valid reason that they 'don't think visually', and as such a designed concept translates a lot better than words or text. From the client side then the process seems to make sense, but I wonder if that'd still be the case when considering the way in which agencies are forced to tackle free pitches?

From my point of view as a creative director my experience of free pitching in a 18 month window has been a mixed bag....

• We've won some one off jobs
• We've won some great accounts
• We've been able to produce some concepts with a healthy sense of urgency
• We've lost several jobs with no explanation
• On occasion we've had 'ideas' stolen from our pitch and then executed by cheaper agencies
• We've pitched and then realised that the person that wrote the brief didn't actually know what they wanted
• We've been forced on occasion to submit rushed or unfinished ideas because of a dodgy brief or live project time constraints
• We've won jobs which have never come to fruition because 'after fielding responses we have now decided to reassess our entire marketing strategy'

So, where do I actually stand? Well as a designer, my primary motivation is always going to be to win the work off the back of a great design concept. I want to invest as much as possible in the creative, and come back with work that I'm proud of that I believe best suits the brief. The problem is, that with a business hat on this is rarely a realistic approach. To even be able to pitch in the first place the agency needs to have the man hours and cash flow to cover their overheads whilst developing concepts. In terms of being conducive to creating a great design, working with the added pressure that every minute could be loosing you money isn't really a complementary mindset. As such, when it comes to 'the pitch' clients often end up with solutions that have been produced in a hurry and with a response that doesn't truly represent the way in which the agency would have tackled the brief had it been a 'live' job.

Organisations like NO!SPEC suggest that creative businesses should protect the interests of the industry by uniting in refusing free pitch requests. NO!SPEC seeks to promote the reasons why free pitching has a detrimental effect on everyone involved and encourages agencies to adopt a 'No spec' mentality. As good as this may sound I do wonder how sustainable this approach is - it's certainly not a business model I can see working for most young agencies (it wouldn't have for us). A number of other organisations like the BDI have piloted pitch guidelines which take a more cooperative approach, seeking to set templates and guides which businesses and agencies can adopt to try and reduce or eradicate the need to produce concepts through a more informed interview process. Again, this sounds great, but without a better awareness of the pitfalls of free pitches amongst 'non creatives' then I wonder how businesses are expected to become motivated to adopt these practices and how some of these principles will actually take root?

So, then is there a solution? Does free pitching work? And do people believe it's an acceptable business practice? As a designer I certainly don't find the process ideal, and as a business owner I have found it can be expensive and costly to both agency and client.

What do people think? over to you.....