In December our procurement team sent me the agency RFP before it went out. Nine sections. A request for three creative territories, a media framework, and a named team. Response window: eighteen days, two of which were Christmas. No fee. I read it twice and felt genuinely sick, because I have written the response to that exact document, at two in the morning, more than once.
I sent it back with half of it deleted. That is the most useful thing I did all quarter.
The pitch process is the only part of this industry where we ask people to do the job in order to be considered for the job, then keep the work and pay nobody.
Spec work does not test an agency's thinking. It tests how much unpaid labor an agency can absorb, which is a proxy for size, not for talent.
Here is what actually happens. Five or six shops get invited. Each one puts three to eight people on it for a month. Nobody bills an hour. One wins. The rest collectively write off six figures, and the client walks away with a folder of ideas it did not pay for and is under no obligation to forget.
The math punishes exactly the shops the brief claims to be looking for. A scrappy fifteen-person studio with the sharpest strategist in the city cannot afford to burn a month on a maybe. A holding company can. So the RFP that says it wants fresh, independent thinking selects, structurally, for whoever has the most bench time.
Three fixes. All boring, all available immediately.
One, pay a pitch fee. Not a token honorarium, an actual one, enough that finalists cover their costs. Two, shortlist to three, never six. Three, tell the losers within a week, in sentences a human being wrote.
The pitch process is the only part of this industry where we ask people to do the job in order to be considered for the job, then keep the work and pay nobody.
That last one is free and almost nobody does it. I know strategists who have never learned why they lost. Six weeks of work, and then the inbox just stays quiet. Nothing happened. Again.
It is the first month of a new decade and the RFP template most brands send is fifteen years old. We rebuilt media, we rebuilt measurement, we rebuilt the org chart twice. We left the front door exactly as it was.
I bought coffee for a former colleague at Ovation last week and she told me her shop had passed on three RFPs this year on principle. She said it the way you confess something. It should be the default answer. If the brief asks for the work for free, the correct response is a polite no and a phone number.