How the UK Industry Is Looking to Fix the Production Pitch Process

Production pitching needs some work. “It's a process that doesn't work well for everybody,” said APA CEO Steve Davies this Tuesday at the launch of the Production Pitch Process Initiative. He was explaining why the new collection of principles and guidelines, jointly launched by the brand, agency and production associations of the UK industry, heralds the sort of change the ad community has been crying out for. 

“The starting point, of course, is looking at the whole process of bidding for jobs, and the amount of wasted resources and cost for production companies,” he continued, drawing on the conversations with APA members that he has every day.

Eliot Liss, head of production for the IPA, has seen the frustration of pitching from the other side, having spent the majority of his career agency side. “In my experience, it was possibly the bit of the entire process that I enjoyed the least,” he said. Which is a shame, because it should be an invigorating part of bringing a project to life. “At its best, the pitch process – talking to a variety of potential brilliant directors about your project, and sparking ideas about different ways that it could be approached – should be a really positive part of our business, and how we make great ads. But things have been slipping in a lot of cases recently.”

The Production Pitch Process Initiative hopes to turn things around. It is built around five key principles – fairness, transparency and communication, economic sustainability and reasonable workload, orderly and timely process, and realistic briefs and expectations – and also recommends associated key actions for all parties to agree upon.

Adjacent to the Production Pitch Process Initiative, the IPA and APA have independently formulated detailed best practice guidance on production pitches for their members. “Agencies wouldn't be doing our job if our clients needed to understand all of this stuff,” said Eliot as he and Steve presented that guidance.

The document, which is available on each of the trade bodies’ websites, drills into the specific scenarios that these principles can be applied to at the different stages of the production bidding process: Strategic and creative development, green light to production, pitch meetings, during the pitch and awarding the pitch.

Highlighting some of these crucial moments in the process, Eliot and Steve commented on the frustrations the guidance was formed to counter. One suggestion Eliot was keen to highlight in particular was the idea of a pre-bid meeting, which would detail budget, usage and deliverables but also any pertinent product points (restrictions, timings, etc). This provides a framework for these elements to be briefed and agreed, and enables accurate and reliable scoping and budgeting by the agency with its production suppliers, including licensed usages, such as talent fees and music. “There is definitely a piece of work to be done in terms of production and business affairs people at agencies upstreaming, understanding in good practice amongst their own colleagues and and their clients. And that's why I particularly focused on the pre-bid meeting, because that's an opportunity prior to the PPO where I think producers can make those connections and have that high quality communication,” he said.

It wasn’t long before the spectre of treatments materialised in the room full of producers. Eliot acknowledged that the industry generally agrees they have got out of hand. “I think there has certainly been, over the years, a bit of an arms race in terms of directors' treatments – their length, their sophistication. They are amazing things often, but when there's a three-way pitch, which almost always has to happen at pace, it's sometimes not what the agency and the client needs or wants.”

There is specific guidance on this in the best practice document, suggesting that agencies may specify page limits or restrictions and that production companies may specify their own restrictions, particularly with regards to rush or out-of-hours work and rounds of revisions. “People should try to be as frank and pragmatic as possible about that,” said Eliot, although no concrete limit on word or page count is stipulated in the guidance.  

“I certainly think that the ask should be proportionate to what is being pitched on,” he offered. “If it is a small budget project and you want three people in the pitch[...] the treatment response has to be fitting. And unless you're paying for people to be involved in the pitch, then your ask on a low-budget project should be very, very limited.”

One downside of pitch meetings is that people are too polite and convivial to raise the difficult subjects, suggested Eliot. “Too often there’s stuff that goes unsaid,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like some of the salient points about what the client's priorities are can get a bit swept under the carpet.” There’s something of the British way of doing business that is to the detriment of transparency. While running through some of the guidance on meetings, he offered: “People should just flat out say, after the meeting, ‘How was that? Are we going to go ahead?’”

Pitching can be a great process for production companies to demonstrate their unique selling points and the maximum triple bid framework remains something that both IPA and APA defend. Steve has seen the value of that industry standard for his members over many years: “I think production companies should always regard being in a fight against two other companies and two other directors as something they're happy to devote their resources towards. And [something] that works well. And also, of course, it means that there's a viable opportunity and less to look through for the clients and agencies.”