A free pitch asks five agencies to spend three weeks guessing. They don’t know the business yet, they haven’t seen the data, and they are competing to be liked by a room of people for forty-five minutes. The work that wins is usually the work that presents best, which is not the same thing as the work that sells best.
It costs agencies a fortune, which comes back to clients in the end. It also teaches everyone the wrong lesson: that the idea is the expensive bit and the thinking is free.
The thinking is the expensive bit.
The sprint
We don’t pitch for free. Instead we offer a paid two-week sprint. You give us your data, a room and the people who sign the budget. We give you back three things: the problem written in one sentence, one idea and where it would run, and a plan for how we’d measure it.
You keep all of it, whether or not we work together afterwards. About one in five clients take the sprint and do the rest themselves, and we think that’s fine. The other four start the work two weeks ahead of where a pitch would have left them.
Why it’s better for clients
You find out what it’s like to work with us before you sign anything bigger. You see how we think, not how we present. And you pay a fair price for something you can use, instead of a hidden price for something that was never finished.