Media Buying Briefing: It’s too soon to declare RIP to the RFP, but some are agitating for change

By Michael Bürgi

No one likes going through the Request for Proposal process — neither the marketer seeking a fresh start with a different agency nor the agency hoping to land new business. It’s costly on both sides, in time, resources and revenue. But it’s also been happening a lot, including the last mediapalooza round, as a result of shortening CMO tenures (a new CMO at a major advertiser usually wants to hire his or her own agency to implement new marketing) and increasingly complex media choices.

So can agencies and their would-be clients change the arduous RFP process? Do they even want to? The answers are maybe and mostly yes, based on the agencies and pitch consultants Digiday spoke to who represent the marketers in many cases.

Jack Skeels and Greg Morrell, respectively the CEO and president of management consultancy Agency Agile, have been pushing hard for agencies to adapt their approach to the RFP process. Rather than regurgitate a list of work done for a number of other clients in their pitch, agencies should ask to problem-solve together with the client to figure out their compatibility, Morrell explained.

Agencies should “use the pitch as a moment to dialogue and challenge, rather than just bringing a bunch of slides,” said Morrell. “Reframe the moment to do exercises together to see what problem-solving looks like. Both sides get a real experience of what it’s like to work together.”

“It’s important to have a conversation, not a presentation,” added Skeels, who noted the agencies that Agency Agile has consulted with have a 90% win rate. “It’s a test of whether the client can have a difficult conversation with the agency.”

Individual agencies and prospective clients may be finding different ways to approach working together, but there’s actually some industry-wide effort as well. Marla Kaplowitz, president and CEO of 4A’s, the industry body that represents agencies, said her organization is in the early stages of working with the Association of National Advertisers, which represents marketers, to develop a central repository of basic information on each agency, including clients, work, staffing, etc., that has to get produced over and over again for the Request for Information portion of a pitch. That frees up agencies to concentrate on the solutions/ideas part of a pitch.

But Kaplowitz also believes agencies should pursue alternatives that help avoid being put in review in the first place. During her time running MEC (a GroupM agency that was eventually merged with Maxus to become Wavemaker), she worked with a client to instate regular check-ins, which resulted in regularly rotating personnel on the account, and both sides agreeing to communicate more constantly. “It was really productive because we embraced radical candor,” said Kaplowitz. “It created this big opportunity for both of us to consider this different way.”

Pitch consultants like Avi Dan, who’s been doing this for decades, see a recent change in the nature of the RFP, brought on mostly by marketers’ continued push to in-house what used to be agency functions. “I’m seeing more RFPs for …read more

Source:: Digiday

      

Aaron
Author: Aaron

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