Inside the mind of Line Up's Duncan Beale
Time to come clean on marketing budgets
Will someone please explain to me what possible value there is for clients in withholding budget information in the pitching process?
We’ve just been involved in a 5-way pitch for a well-known brand, responding to a broad experiential brief. Having heard that we’d been unsuccessful, we asked the usual round of questions in order to ascertain where we’d gone wrong and how we could improve future chances. One of the nuggets of information that I managed to glean was that the difference between the highest and lowest bids submitted was over £1m, and we ended up somewhere in the middle.
Now if we were all builders quoting to one clear specification, then withholding the budget is fair enough. But agencies are not builders - we are ‘creative architects’. Our skill is finding the most visionary solutions to particular challenges, making best use of the client’s available budget. When agencies responding to the same brief are over £1m apart in their budgets, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that brief. Sure, the clients get a range of ideas at different price points, but what they don’t get is any ability to compare like for like. Crucially, they can’t identify which agency is likely to deliver most for a particular level of spend – something I thought procurement was meant to encourage.
Of course this might come across like sour grapes that we didn’t win. But my problem isn’t with the result, it is with the fact that we were all running in a different race. Clients need to ensure that those they invite to compete for their business are given a level playing field, and that begins with budget transparency.
