For years, the selection of an advertising holding company by a major marketer has resembled nothing so much as a royal wedding: elaborate, exhausting and conducted under the assumption that everyone involved had nothing better to do for 12 months.
That assumption, it seems, is being reconsidered.
The comments dropped across recent earnings calls from the large holding companies paint a picture of a pitch process that is quietly being streamlined at the top of the market. François Laroze, the chief financial officer of Havas, spoke of more integrated pitches. Arthur Sadoun, the chief executive of Publicis Groupe, noted that clients are running tighter competitions, pitting one or two holding companies against each other rather than staging what he did not call, but might as well have, a beauty pageant. John Wren of Omnicom talked about helping clients extract value from technology investments they have already made.
The recent moves bear this out. Coca-Cola's North American media review, which came loose in September after Publicis won PepsiCo's global media business, involved only Omnicom and Dentsu; WPP sat it out entirely. (One imagines the conference room felt positively roomy.) PepsiCo moved its global media account without a formal pitch at all. Jaguar Land Rover went looking for a single holding company to build a bespoke unit handling creative, media and production under one roof.
"Clients are being proactive at thinking about what they want to own," said David Muldoon, the global managing director of marketing transformation at Ebiquity, the media management firm.
The consolidation of the industry has made the old process feel increasingly redundant. When Omnicom absorbed Interpublic and Publicis built its lead in data and technology, the field of credible global partners shrank. A marketer whose chief rival already sits at one of the remaining giants may find there is simply nowhere else to go — and so does not go anywhere at all.
None of this means the formal pitch is headed for extinction. Pitch consultants report full calendars, and 2027 is expected to bring a fresh wave of reviews. The full process, after all, puts a price on the market, and for procurement departments that must demonstrate competitive rigor, that price is worth the trouble.
But for those who already know what they want, the year-long slog of diary coordination and scorecard arbitration has begun to look less like due diligence and more like expensive theater.
Original story published in Digiday: "There’s no longer one way to pitch for a big account", by Seb Joseph, Krystal Scanlon