Pitching is a strange beast. On the one hand, it is frustrating - you have to put a lot of time, thought, effort and resources into an endeavour which in most cases results in you not getting paid for your team\'s time and experience if you do not win the account.

On the other hand, pitching can be one of the most exciting and fun things that happens in an agency.

When a pitch is on, it is like a grudge match. It brings together the whole agency via late nights and pizzas. Your team works together to create something special, something that will make you stand out against your competitors in what is essentially a hard fought battle where the prize is a nice new shiny project or account. At Absolute we have had many discussions about pitching. Whilst we always lament about how it is a frustrating process (which over the year costs us a lot of money..) and we weakly say in a hangover-esque manner "we are never pitching again" we always get a bit excited when the next pitch invitation comes through the door.

Personally, I have mixed feelings about the whole process. One part of me thinks it is like asking a builder to put up a shed in your garden before letting them quote to build you a new house (and they have to supply their own wood, nails and Cuprinol). The other part of me loves to do it - It is an opportunity to show off. It is an opportunity to get into the spirit of competition and see what you are made of, and, when you present your ideas to the client and you DO win, it is brilliant.

From the client\'s side - does pitching help? It certainly gives clients a number of different responses to their brief. However are these responses the best solution to their problem? Without the usual in-depth collaborative phase with a client at the start of the project, are we just creating pretty pictures, or proving our competency in Photoshop?

Gone too are the days when the process was reserved for your leading, household-name-brands to choose a roster of agencies to work with over several years. It wouldn’t be a surprise these days to be asked to pitch for the smallest of jobs, with some companies expecting agencies to not only go through a pitch process to get onto a preferred roster, but also to pitch for each individual piece of work (regardless of size) moving forward. Pitching is currently seen by some as the only way to choose an agency, but it isn’t - we were amazed last week when a new client just rang up and said they liked our website and wanted us to work with them. This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, least of all us!

We have pitched a number of times this year at Absolute, to a bunch of different clients at different levels. Some we have won, some we have lost. It just so transpires that some of the pitches we have lost out on have ended up revealing different opportunities with that very same client on different projects. When pitching to a new client, we feel it is possibly more important to show them who we are, how we work and how we can think differently than it is to rigidly respond to their initial brief.

I guess if there was any kind of conclusion to this article, it would be to say that for better or worse, pitching is not going to go away anytime soon. It is an accepted part of our industry which as an agency, you can choose to be involved with.

You can\'t win them all - and if you did, the process would not be quite as exciting.