You know the story – prospective client submits a brief to redevelop website, you have 10 days to respond with everything from an information architecture, site visuals and a detailed costing. The degree of effort this will take would normally run into £,000’s.

We know why clients operate in this way of course. Who wouldn’t want to have talented companies running around without payment to give you their best ideas?? The misunderstanding, however, is that by providing speculative effort, that tends to be centred on design, agencies are showing their best work.

When pitches are undertaken agencies are prone to make a far higher level of assumption on what the client needs, the time and chance to communicate isn’t available so quick decisions need to be made in order to deliver in the short timescale. Quite often these efforts form the basis of the entire project meaning a direction has been set as the result of guesswork when putting together the pitch.

There is the argument of course that agencies actually secretly enjoy this process, and whilst complaining about it on the surface, deep down we get a great thrill at the competitive nature of pitting our wits against our peers.

Personally, I have always felt that the pitch process is an awful way for a designer/agency to win business as we utterly devalue our creative process by doing it for free. More importantly though is the fact that it’s not in the clients interest to judge work that is produced so early in a relationship, without the opportunity of research, discussion and discovery that would be undertaken in a commissioned project.