I think we need to have an honest conversation about RFPs.
They are killing agencies. Or, at the very least, they are forcing agencies to spend an enormous amount of time, energy, and creative capital chasing work they have a relatively small chance of ever winning. A serious RFP response is not a couple of people sitting around a table for an afternoon. It can mean weeks of strategy, creative development, design, budgeting, production planning, vendor outreach, deck building, rehearsals, and revisions. Agencies can easily pour hundreds of hours into a pitch before a single dollar of revenue exists. And almost all of that work is done for free. Somehow, we have collectively decided that this is a reasonable way to buy creative services.
The odds also aren't always what they appear to be. You're not necessarily pitching against three or four other agencies on equal footing. Sometimes you're pitching against an incumbent that has years of institutional knowledge, established relationships, and a massive head start. Other times, the decision may already be leaning in a particular direction, but a large corporation's procurement process requires multiple bids to demonstrate due process. I understand why those policies exist. Companies need controls around how they spend money. But from the agency side, it can mean investing tens of thousands of dollars worth of people's time into what is effectively a procedural exercise. We might technically have a seat at the table, but that doesn't always mean every seat has the same chance of winning.
Then there is the creative work itself. Agencies are routinely asked to provide strategy, concepts, renderings, programming ideas, production approaches, and sometimes nearly executable plans as part of the RFP process. Again, for free. Even when everyone is operating in good faith, brands can walk away from an RFP with an incredible amount of thinking from several different agencies while paying none of them for it. Take five agencies through a pitch and you have essentially commissioned five creative teams to attack the same problem, then paid only one of them. In almost any other professional service industry, asking multiple companies to produce substantial portions of the actual work for free before deciding who gets hired would sound insane. In ours, we've normalized it.
Making matters worse, RFPs are very often moving targets. The brief says one thing. The Q&A reveals something else. A stakeholder joins halfway through and changes the priority. The ask evolves. The evaluation criteria are vague. And one of the biggest pieces of information agencies need to develop a responsible idea, the budget, is frequently missing altogether. So now five agencies are interpreting the same vague assignment five completely different ways. One might pitch a $250,000 solution while another is designing a $2 million one, and neither knows whether they're remotely close to the client's expectations. That isn't necessarily a test of creativity. Sometimes it's just a test of who guessed correctly.
I don't think RFPs need to disappear entirely. I think they need to get better. Give agencies a real budget. Give them a clear brief. Tell them who they're competing against and whether an incumbent is involved. Keep the scope consistent throughout the process. Pay a pitch fee when you're asking for meaningful original creative work. And most importantly, respect the amount of work being requested before a partnership even begins. Agencies should absolutely have to earn business. We should have to demonstrate our thinking, our capabilities, our experience, and why we're the right partner. But there is a difference between proving you can do the work and doing the work for free.
The irony is that brands say they want great agency partners, while the process they use to find them can burn those agencies out before the relationship even starts. Maybe the future isn't about asking more agencies to pitch more ideas. Maybe it's about creating a better process that gives both sides enough information to decide whether they actually belong at the same table.