I have been pitching advertising accounts since my first days in the advertising business. I have managed the agency new business process, managed individual pitches and now, as an agency owner, take this process even more seriously than ever before.

Advertising Age has put up videos of agency creative directors bitching about what clients expect in pitches and many agencies provide (free ideas), the pitch ordeal itself and agency compensation (what if it only takes fours hours at $300 an hour to arrive at a multimillion dollar concept.)

Here is our take. Ralston360 pitches only business we think we can win. We beg out of lengthy data-digging RFP requests that appear to be run by people simply justifying their jobs. When we pitch we do it right and really push the strategic thinking angle not the “hey we make pretty cool pictures” pitch (last year we beat out four very sharp creative oriented national shops for the Legalzoom.com account.) We never do spec creative. To prove how we can think through a prospect’s objectives, we might do a couple of mini-ideas like this one for the LegalZoom pitch. This is what LegalZoom’s high quality online legal services could do to the world of lawyers with a bit of guerrilla marketing.

The bottom line (this is a long list)… This is a tough business that has been made tougher by mega agency holding companies beholden to Wall Street, the loss of the 15% commission in the 1990’s killed the golden goose, there is never a lack of agencies willing to give away ideas (their only asset), many agencies are frankly cookie-cutter, many clients have no clue how to do an agency review, many clients don’t really know what they are looking for, many clients do not know how to work with agencies and don’t seem to have much respect for their agency partners, pitches are occasionally run by bean counters, many lengthy pitches result in accounts that offer significantly lower agency compensation than the client originally offered.

The real bottom line? This business still beats out most for delivering a positive fun to compensation ratio. I certainly wouldn’t give this up to be one of the Marketing Directors that only last 23 months.