Pitches and tenders are one of the most counterproductive rituals in the creative and strategic industries. They promise fairness, objectivity and structured comparison, yet rarely deliver any of those things. What they often create instead is a system that undervalues expertise, favours volume over thinking and reduces meaningful partnership to a checklist.
We’ve been doing this long enough to see the pattern: Pitches strip work of its context. Tenders strip work of its nuance. And both strip value out of the industry.
Pitches ask for ideas without understanding
A pitch asks an agency to demonstrate its value before it has any chance to understand the organisation, its challenges, its audience or its ambitions. The result is creative work produced in a vacuum: ideas without context, strategy without insight, design without purpose. It looks like work, but it isn’t the right work. It can only ever be superficial because the process itself only allows for superficiality.
Yet organisations often use these surface-level ideas to make major decisions about long-term partnerships. It is a flawed model that benefits no one.
And frankly, it’s rude
We believe it’s unreasonable – even disrespectful – to ask creative professionals to provide hours or days of unpaid work just to be considered. No other professional field is asked to audition this way.
A parent wouldn’t ask if their child can attend a school for a term without paying, just to ‘see if they like it’.
You wouldn’t ask a lawyer for a free day in court to test whether they might be a good fit.
No one asks a builder to construct the foundation of a house for free so they can compare quotes.
A surgeon won’t perform a sample procedure and wait to hear if you’d like to book the rest.
Even a café won’t make five coffees so you can decide if you ‘feel aligned’.
Yet in the creative industry, it has somehow become normal to request thousands of dollars’ worth of unpaid labour as an entry requirement. We don’t subscribe to that culture.
Tenders say ‘value’ but often mean ‘price’
We regularly see tenders that insist they are not focused on the lowest price, but the mathematics tells a different story. Weighted scoring systems nearly always drag decisions towards cost. In the end, the choice often comes down to who can produce the most documentation for the least money. That isn’t how strong creative or strategic partnerships are formed.
Qute simply, agencies skilled at writing tenders win tenders.
However, those skilled at solving real problems often don’t engage in the process at all (like us).
Box-ticking isn’t partnership
A hastily prepared RFP can force agencies into presenting themselves in ways that have little to do with how they actually work. Expertise must be squeezed into pre-defined tables. Experience must be condensed into checkboxes. Creativity must be justified in paragraphs instead of demonstrated in conversation.
The output becomes performative compliance, not genuine alignment.
This is not how you evaluate strategic fit.
It is not how you discover shared values or establish trust.
It is not how long-term collaboration is built.
Why we don’t pitch
We don’t pitch because pitching devalues thinking.
We don’t produce speculative work because work without understanding is not strategy.
We don’t respond to box-ticking tenders because they strip away the context we rely on to do our job properly.
This isn’t arrogance. It’s respect for our discipline, our clients and our craft.
What we believe in instead
We prefer to meet properly, talk, listen and understand. We explore your challenges, your context and your ambitions. From there, we propose a partnership that reflects your needs, not a template created for procurement speed.
Our approach is based on clarity, collaboration and deeper understanding. It works because good work requires trust, not auditions.
A better way to choose an agency
If the goal is to find an agency who thinks well, communicates clearly and collaborates intelligently, conversation is far more revealing than competition. Explore chemistry, not compliance. Seek alignment, not templates. Look for understanding, not just presentation polish.
Choosing an agency is not a numbers game.
It’s about fit, values and partnerships. And partnerships are built through dialogue, not demands for free work.