Consultancy firms reshape agency pitches as brands step up procurement and conflict checks

Agency pitches are no longer being decided solely on the strength of the big idea. As brands tighten marketing budgets and advertising holding companies consolidate, agency selection is increasingly becoming a balancing act between creative and strategic capability, commercial efficiency, procurement benchmarks and conflict-of-interest safeguards.

The change is giving procurement teams and external consultants a larger role in the pitch process. Consultants are brought in to benchmark fees, structure evaluation criteria, assess commercial proposals, shortlist agencies and examine governance and conflicts of interest.

The shift is particularly visible in media, where agencies are expected to deliver efficiency across television, digital, publishers, retail media and technology platforms. Recent large-scale media reviews have involved consulting firms including A.T. Kearney, Deloitte, PwC and Ebiquity.

For agencies, this means that winning a pitch now requires more than a strong creative or media plan. They must also demonstrate business understanding, commercial value, technology capabilities, data security, category expertise and the ability to manage competing accounts.

Consultants bring structure to agency selection

Consultants are increasingly acting as process architects rather than final decision-makers. Their role includes creating evaluation matrices, defining parameters, shortlisting agencies and benchmarking commercials so that competing agencies are assessed against a common framework.

An industry executive said the basic parameters for evaluating creative agencies have not changed substantially. “The parameters remain the same. The creative work is just a part of it. The understanding of the business, consumers and most importantly the energy and commitment of the team have always been the primary parameters,” the executive said.

The objective, therefore, is less about outsourcing the decision and more about reducing internal bias and bringing discipline to a time-consuming process.

“Consultants are brought in primarily to minimise the impact of internal biases and ensure a fair and structured evaluation process,” the executive said. “The pitch process is an extensive and time-consuming exercise, particularly for senior management.”

The executive added that consultants are “rarely the decision-makers” and generally have limited influence over the final outcome. Their primary role is to identify and bring the right agencies to the table, after which the client team makes the final assessment.

Chemistry remains difficult to quantify

While the process is becoming more structured, some of the factors that determine whether an agency relationship succeeds remain difficult to put into a scoring matrix.

“Chemistry, coordination between teams, and leadership involvement during and after the pitch are the first three parameters of evaluation - and rightly so,” the executive said. These are followed by “the quality of strategy and creative manifestation”.

Abhishek Raut, Senior Creative Director, Gozoop Creative, said the growing list of evaluation criteria has complicated what was once a relatively straightforward process.

“At the end of the day, people still work with people. We’ve just made the process of finding that out incredibly complicated,” Raut said.

“We used to pitch ideas. Now we pitch ideas, chemistry, AI, data security, category expertise, culture, commercials… and occasionally, the idea.”

Procurement gets a bigger seat at the table

Procurement has emerged as one of the biggest forces reshaping agency pitches. While marketing teams assess strategy, creative capabilities and chemistry, procurement can bring greater scrutiny to fees, commercial structures and overall value.

Naresh Gupta, Co-founder of Bang in the Middle, said cost has become a decisive factor. “Today, across all pitches, cost plays a very big role in who wins the pitch,” he said.

Gupta believes the traditional differentiators between agencies have narrowed. “On most other factors, the network agencies have equalised the scores, so ability, expertise, creative quality and chemistry have started to even out,” he said.

As agencies become more comparable on credentials and capabilities, commercial terms can increasingly become the differentiator.

“Clients making agency selection a social media event” has also contributed to the changing dynamics, Gupta said, adding that “the procurement departments today have greater power to make the final choice compared to marketing teams.”

The growing role of procurement is particularly relevant in media, where agencies are expected to demonstrate measurable returns from increasingly fragmented media investments.

Partho Dasgupta, Managing Partner, Thoth Advisors and ex CEO, BARC India, said media agencies often focus heavily on the deals they can secure from broadcasters, publishers and platforms.

For advertisers, the evaluation goes beyond buying power. “Performance parameters like brand lift or sales - depending on what the brand objectives are, pricing and fees and in case of media agencies - more bang for the buck spent,” Dasgupta said.

Conflict of interest becomes a bigger concern

While procurement is changing the commercial side of pitches, holding-company consolidation is complicating the conflict-of-interest equation.

The traditional model was relatively simple: a brand wanted assurance that its agency did not handle a direct competitor. But with multiple agencies operating under the same holding company, brands are increasingly questioning whether separation between sister agencies is meaningful when they share leadership, talent, technology and data infrastructure.

Abhik Santara, Co-Founder, Atom Network, said this is a genuine concern for large advertisers.

“For large brands, this should certainly be a matter of concern - and it is. In reality, the concept of ‘Chinese walls’ within agency networks is often more theoretical than practical. Having worked across multiple network agencies, I have seen instances where sister agencies or group companies effectively operate with the same talent, with people simply carrying different business cards,” Santara said.

However, Santara believes exclusivity also has to reflect the commercial significance of the client. “That said, brands that are not significant contributors to an agency’s revenue cannot reasonably expect complete exclusivity. The expectation of exclusivity should be proportionate to the scale and commercial significance of the relationship,” he said.

This makes conflict-of-interest checks increasingly nuanced. Brands are not only asking whether an agency has a competing account, but also examining who is working on those accounts and what information, technology and infrastructure they can access.

Confidentiality moves beyond the contract

Brands are increasingly seeking practical safeguards around confidential information rather than relying only on contractual clauses.

“Brands want to understand the practical safeguards around access to information, data handling, team structures, technology platforms and IP,” the industry executive said. They also expect “clear protocols to prevent sensitive information from being shared across accounts”.

The challenge is that shared infrastructure can make confidentiality harder to substantiate.

“Confidentiality, in its true sense, can be very difficult to substantiate, given shared leadership, talent and infrastructure across group companies,” the executive said.

Gupta said the issue is particularly important for media agencies. “The data and confidentiality are more of an issue with media agencies, and less with creative agencies, but the call is always at the holding co level,” he said. “With holding companies creating unified data backends, the individual agencies do not have the flexibility.”

Dedicated teams offer a middle ground

Complete exclusivity is becoming harder as the pool of agencies shrinks.

Gupta said, “The creative agencies that even networks have have shrunk, and while the clients may have issues in confidentiality, they are being left with fewer choices.” He added, “There are not enough agencies to handle creative work for all the brands in the category.”

The industry is therefore increasingly relying on dedicated teams to manage competing accounts.

Dasgupta said agencies can ensure that specific teams do not handle conflicting brands. “Yes, they would like to ensure the same team doesn’t work on competing brands and doesn’t share like consumer insights and strategy,” he said.

Gupta said this is likely to become an increasingly common arrangement. “Clients are finding ways around it by getting agencies to create dedicated teams,” he said. “This is an evolving scenario and we don't know where it will lead to, but exclusive relationships will be difficult to have.”

Pitch economics are changing

The expanding evaluation process is also increasing the pressure on agencies to deliver more during a pitch.

Gupta said the purpose of pitch creative has shifted from testing an agency's thinking to assessing whether the work can be executed immediately. “Earlier, the pitch creative was to test how the agency thinks; now the pitch creative is to see if the work can be released as is,” he said. “The client expectations are around speed and not depth.”

Agencies are consequently investing in speculative creative work while also demonstrating capabilities in AI, data, technology, security, category expertise and commercials.

At the same time, agency relationships are becoming shorter. “The average tenure of agency relationships is now around 2 years, so long-term is 24 months,” Gupta said.

The shorter tenure makes immediate delivery, team strength and commercial efficiency more important, while reducing the time agencies have to prove their value.

The new agency selection equation

The modern agency pitch now brings together several competing priorities. Marketing teams want strategy, creativity and chemistry. Procurement wants commercial discipline. Consultants want a transparent and comparable process. Senior management wants business outcomes, while legal and compliance teams increasingly focus on conflicts, confidentiality and data protection.

Industry executives believe commercial expectations should ideally be established before the pitch reaches its final stage.

“Both sides need to have a clear understanding of the commercial expectations upfront, so that the pitch can remain focused on finding the right strategic and creative partner rather than becoming a negotiation on commercials at the very end,” the executive said.

For brands, consultants and procurement can bring greater transparency and discipline to agency selection. But the challenge is ensuring that the process does not become so heavily weighted towards measurable parameters that it loses sight of the agency-client relationship.

As Raut put it: “We used to pitch ideas. Now we pitch ideas, chemistry, AI, data security, category expertise, culture, commercials… and occasionally, the idea.”

For agencies, the pitch has consequently become a test of everything from creative thinking and business understanding to commercials, technology, data security and conflict management.

The question for brands is whether the increasingly sophisticated pitch process will ultimately identify the best strategic partner — or simply the agency that performs best on the scorecard.