The definitive guide to running a creative agency pitch

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Rebecca Nunneley Partner

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AAR Partner Rebecca Nunneley works closely with marketing leaders navigating the complex, fast-moving creative agency landscape, and she’s asked several times a week who the best agencies in the market are right now. Her answer never changes: best at what, and best for whom?

Choosing a creative agency is a high-stakes decision. The right creative partner can bring strategic clarity, create ideas that change share price and challenge you to be more ambitious. However, the consequences of making the wrong call (or running a selection process for the wrong reasons in the first place) are serious enough to keep any marketing leader up at night.

Rebecca says that there’s no universal “best agency,” only the right agency for the right client, the right challenge, and the right moment. The same agency can be exactly right in one context and completely wrong in another, depending on the capability needed, the way the client works, and the kind of partnership they’re looking for.

The bigger challenge is getting to grips with the problem that actually needs solving, and then building an approach to agency selection (if needed) that creates the conditions for a long-lasting relationship. It’s not a paint-by-numbers exercise, which is where the expertise of Rebecca’s pitch consultancy – from shaping briefs to managing agency relationships – comes into play. Here’s her advice.

1. Start with the challenge, not the shortlist

The most common mistake brands make is starting with the wrong question. Marketing teams often ask which agencies they should speak to, when the first question should always be what business challenge or strategic ambition they’re actually trying to address.

A pitch is a major undertaking, and building a shortlist before understanding the root issue risks a process that runs smoothly but solves the wrong problem – or solves nothing at all. In some cases, a brand doesn’t need a new agency, and a pitch process wastes resources when a clearer operating model, a better brief, or an honest conversation with the incumbent would have served them better.

With this in mind, it’s important to interrogate the friction you might be feeling with an existing partner.

When friction shows up, it tends to surface slowly over time as frustration – the work feels slow, uninspired, or disconnected. But the underlying causes are almost always structural. Before going to market, brands need to slow down and isolate what’s actually going on:

Structural friction: unclear decision rights, mismatched capabilities, or a briefing process that isn’t working
Terminology misalignment: using terms like “brand strategy,” “content,” “social,” or “integration” which can mean entirely different things to different people or in different contexts
Conflicting requirements: expecting a single partner to deliver big brand thinking, rapid turnaround, specialist depth with full integration, efficiency, and simplicity all at once

Rebecca’s advice is always to take a step back and think about whether this is an agency problem or an agency model problem. Even the very best agencies will struggle to perform in a model that isn’t set up for success, so taking the time to assess the capabilities you need, how agency partners fit together, where responsibilities sit and how work flows across the ecosystem can often have a greater impact than changing the agencies themselves.

2. Build a shortlist with range and discipline

A strong shortlist needs range, but it also needs a red thread. Every agency on a pitch list has to be one the client would genuinely be willing to appoint. Including an agency with no real chance of winning isn’t just unfair to them – it produces feedback rooted in things they could never have changed, like scale, location, or ownership structure.

Brands also default to familiar names because they’re easier to defend internally. But looking only at the obvious agencies tends to mean only seeing the obvious answers. And keeping an incumbent on the list simply because dropping them feels politically awkward is ultimately more taxing to them as an organisation.

Ask yourselves internally, “when we get to the end of this process and the incumbent agency has won, how do I feel?”. If the answer is anything along the lines of “disappointed” or “deflated” then the answer on whether or not to include them is no.

3. Write a brief that invites a real answer, not a guessing game

The best briefs give agencies enough to work with without pre-writing the answer for them. A good brief sets out the business context, the commercial reality, the ambition, and the criteria for success – including the parts that are difficult or unresolved. Agencies do better work when they understand the shape of the challenge, not just the list of deliverables.

Weak briefs tend to fail in one of two directions: too vague, so agencies are left guessing at a problem that was never properly defined, or too prescriptive, so the “response” becomes an exercise in following instructions rather than genuine strategic or creative thinking.

Either way, the brief should be judged by whether it gives creative agencies a fair chance to show how they think and challenge – not by how well it tests their ability to guess what the client already has in mind. This is why, in any AAR supported process, one of the first steps is collaborating with the brand team to get the brief right.

4. Focus on how an agency shows up in the entire process, not just what they present in the pitch

A pitch presentation shows an agency at its most rehearsed. Every team on pitch day is polished, senior, and highly motivated – that’s simply the nature of the format. Judging a partner on that alone tells you how well they pitch, not how well they’ll actually work with you.

How an agency really operates shows up earlier and more quietly:

Between meetings: the quality of the questions they ask, the homework they’ve done, the time they’ve invested getting close to your business and/or product
During chemistry sessions: can you see yourselves working together, have they used the time with you to collaborate and pressure-test their thinking
Team: do they come across as a genuine team, are their roles clearly defined, if you took the most senior person out of the room does that change how you feel about the team, can you imagine picking up the phone to them to ask for advice

Paired with a structured evaluation framework, the final decision will be anchored to who’s best equipped to keep solving problems over time, rather than a subjective popularity contest.

5. Balance criteria explicitly and align commercials early

Capability, chemistry, commercials, and cultural fit rarely pull in the same direction. A structured process exists to make those trade-offs explicit rather than emotional.

Criteria should be weighted in advance, based on what the business actually needs most. Ranking requirements into clear must-haves and nice-to-haves stops the process turning into a search for “everything and the kitchen sink,” as Rebecca often jokes with clients. Many organisations want transformational brand thinking alongside faster content production, specialist expertise alongside fewer agency relationships, and greater creativity alongside greater efficiency.

While all of those ambitions are valid, Rebecca’s advice is to prioritise what matters most before going to market because, if every requirement carries equal weight, you risk ending up with a jack of all trades, master of none, and it becomes much harder to identify the kind of agency best equipped to solve the challenge.

Finally, commercials should be built into the operating model from the outset, not negotiated as an afterthought. The commercial model has to support the way you actually want the partnership to work.

6. The bigger picture: protecting momentum after the appointment

Momentum is lost the moment an appointment gets treated as the finish line. Everyone exhales, and the hard work of making the partnership function gets undercooked.

The first 100 days determine whether the value of that selection decision holds or fades. That means clear transition leadership on the client side, explicit alignment on roles, decision rights and KPIs, and a formal checkpoint – such as AAR’s 100-Day Health Check – to review progress and adjust early, before bad habits set in.

Conclusion

The best pitch processes are not the most elaborate. They are the ones that force the right conversations early, create genuine choice, and help the client make a decision they can still stand behind six months later. But these kinds of pitches don’t happen by accident. They require clear objectives, disciplined process design and robust evaluation.

Whether managing the process internally or with specialist support, brands that approach pitches strategically are more likely to select partners that drive long-term growth.

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For more than five decades, AAR has supported brands and agencies through successful pitch processes, helping to create fairer, more effective outcomes for both sides. If you’re considering a pitch, reviewing your agency relationships, or if you’re an agency planning your next stage of growth, we’d welcome a conversation.

FAQs

Have a question we didn’t answer? Contact us

What is a pitch consultant and what do they do?

An independent consultant sits between the brand and the agency market, bringing objectivity, structure and challenge to a process that can otherwise become subjective or political. That means helping diagnose the real problem, shaping the brief, building a sharper shortlist, designing a fair process, and making sure the final decision rests on the right criteria.

Should a brand include its current agency in a new creative pitch?

Only if the incumbent has a genuine chance of winning based on the new brief and direction. Including them purely for political comfort, or to avoid an awkward conversation, is unfair to the agency and means they’re investing significant time and resources in a process they were never realistically going to win.

How do we prevent agencies from presenting a senior “pitch team” that disappears once the contract is signed?

Watch how the team behaves throughout the process, not just on pitch day – the quality of their questions, who is actually driving the thinking, and whether senior figures feel genuinely involved or simply wheeled out for the occasion. Building clarity on team composition and expected involvement into the commercial agreement, before sign-off, protects against this later down the line.

What is the risk of choosing an agency based on a single outstanding creative idea during the pitch?

A standout idea shows an agency landed a strong answer under pitch conditions – it doesn’t guarantee they can repeat it. Look instead at the thinking behind the idea: the methodology, the strategic depth, and how well the agency adapts when the brief, budget or timeline inevitably shifts.

How does an independent pitch consultant help align internal stakeholders?

Internal teams often hold conflicting views on what “good” looks like. An independent consultant brings objectivity and structure, helping stakeholders separate symptoms from root causes and align on what success actually looks like before involving the market, setting up an objective evaluation framework, and keeping the whole decision anchored to what the business actually needs.