Pitch Theater Is a Tax on Everyone

Last month we walked into a chemistry meeting and the prospective client visibly braced for a show. They had spent two weeks watching agencies perform: the dimmed lights, the emotional case film about the agency itself, the strategist doing a TED walk, the big reveal of speculative work built on two paragraphs of brief. When we opened a document instead and said "we would rather show you how we think about your actual problem," the CMO physically relaxed. We won the work. I do not think those two facts are unrelated.

It is Cannes week as I write this, the industry's annual festival of performance, so it feels like the right moment to say the quiet thing: pitch theater is a tax, and everyone pays it except the theater.

What the theater actually costs

Start with the obvious: speculative creative produced in three weeks by a team that has never met your customers, priced into every fee you will ever pay an agency. The industry burns astonishing sums annually on unpaid pitch work, and that money does not vanish. It comes back to clients as overhead, and it comes back to agency staff as burnout, because pitch sprints are stacked on top of paying work, nights and weekends, indefinitely.

But the deeper cost is selection error. A pitch measures exactly one capability: the ability to pitch. It is a genuine skill, and it correlates with the actual job about as well as a first date correlates with a marriage. The best performance in the room routinely beats the best thinking for the business, and everyone in the industry knows a roster of famous pitch-winning campaigns that quietly never ran, or ran and did nothing. The theater selects for confidence under stage lights. The work requires judgment over eighteen unglamorous months.

The AI twist that makes this urgent

Here is why this old complaint deserves new attention in 2025: generative tools have made spec work nearly free to produce and nearly impossible to evaluate. Any agency can now arrive with a full campaign world: films, endlines, social matrices, all conjured in a week. The polish that once signaled at least effort and craft now signals a subscription. Clients report pitches where five agencies presented eerily similar AI-assisted campaign universes, each gorgeous, none grounded in a single conversation with a real customer.

When production is free, spec work's last defensible signal is gone. All that remains to evaluate is the thinking, so evaluate the thinking directly and skip the pageant.

What we do instead

We are not naive about competition; we compete constantly. We have just replaced performance with evidence:

• Paid discovery sprints. Two weeks, modest fee, real access, and the output is ours to present and theirs to keep. Clients see actual thinking on their actual problem, and both sides experience the working relationship before marrying it.
• The working session audition. Ninety minutes, their brief, our senior team, live. No slides brought into the room. How we ask questions tells them more than any case film.
• References before razzle. We put prospective clients on the phone with current ones, including one engagement that had rough patches, and we say so. Nothing we could perform beats what Northwind's team says about year two of working together.

For the clients reading this

If you run pitches, you set the incentives. Pay for spec work or do not request it. Weight the working session over the show. Ask every agency which senior people in the room will actually be on the account in month six, and get it in writing. And be suspicious of anything too finished: a complete campaign built without your data is fiction with good typography.

The theater persists because it flatters everyone for an afternoon. The work is what you live with. Buy the work.