Winning a pitch is rarely just about who has the best presentation on the day. Far beyond simply putting a strong deck together, the challenge lies in understanding what a client actually needs beyond the words on the paper, and finding the best way to realise their ambitions.
This means understanding a business well enough to answer the unspoken aspects that a brief is built on. More than this, though, it’s about proving that your team can provide solutions throughout your working relationship – dealing with the daily realities and not just the day of the pitch itself.
What does it take to win a pitch, and who’s asking?
Tobi Asare joined AAR in 2026 as Growth Partner, and is a member of our leadership team. She works across the consultancy’s full range of services, including marketing operating model design, agency model development, agency search and selection, and broader marketing transformation.
Before joining AAR, she held senior roles within leading media agencies, giving her a deep understanding of both client and agency perspectives.
Drawing directly from this dual vantage point, we asked Tobi to outline the factors that separate a winning pitch from a losing effort.
1. Understand the brief behind the brief
The foundation of a successful pitch begins upstream, long before the final presentation. In Tobi’s view, an agency wins a pitch almost before it starts; before it ever enters the pitch room. That comes from digging into the brief behind the brief – the business context, the competitive landscape, where the individuals involved sit within their own mission and strategy, what’s missing from their team in terms of talent and capability, and where the brand wants to go next.
Deeply understanding a category, she notes, means understanding trends, competitive dynamics, incoming regulation, detailed customer dynamics and behaviours, pricing, and supply chain pressures. Understanding a business is a different exercise entirely: how decisions actually get made, who the stakeholders are, how the organisation makes and loses money, and which functions influence marketing without ever sitting inside a marketing meeting.
Her test for whether an agency has done this work properly is a simple one: could you run alongside the brand marketing team within a particular business and genuinely feel and understand their day-to-day challenges? An agency needs to think of itself as the right hand and genuine partner, not just a supplier.
This is also where, for Tobi, an AAR-run process gives agencies a head start. Because AAR spends significant time with brands before a brief ever goes out, the brief an agency receives through an AAR process already reflects a deeper understanding of the client’s operating model and agency model, and how the two fit together within the context of the wider strategy. Agencies pitching through that process are, in effect, starting the “brief behind the brief” work from a stronger footing than they would elsewhere.
2. Recognise why strong ideas still lose
While a great concept is the keystone of a successful pitch, it isn’t enough to win on its own, and Tobi is direct about why agencies with strong ideas still walk away empty-handed.
Sometimes it comes down to chemistry between the individuals in the room on the day. Other times, it’s a failure to field the right blend of seniority. Leadership needs a presence, but clients also need to see and feel who they’ll actually be spending their time with. If they don’t get that, it’s hard for them to picture the working relationship in practice.
And sometimes, however conceptually strong an idea is, it doesn’t hold up against the operational reality of the client’s business today, or where that business is heading tomorrow. And occasionally agencies simply misread the brief, or drift from it.
3. Build chemistry, but don’t over-engineer it
Regarding team dynamics, Tobi is clear that chemistry is a decisive factor. Clients can sense when it’s working, and they can sense when it’s off. Chemistry isn’t just internal to the agency team, either – it’s about how the client’s own team fits into the mix.
Her advice to agencies is to resist walking into early meetings with fixed assumptions about a brand’s chemistry. Instead, you should leave space across the process to build it, through moments that show the agency genuinely cares about the client as a business, and not just as an opportunity. That has to be authentic; it can’t be forced.
But there’s a ceiling. Agencies shouldn’t over-engineer it. Enthusiasm and pitch theatre can tip over into distraction, pulling focus away from actually answering the question the client has asked. Chemistry matters, but it can’t come at the expense of substance.
4. Bring the people who’ll actually do the work
On team composition, Tobi’s view is that agencies should bring as much of the day-to-day account team into the pitch room as possible.
Leadership has a legitimate place there too – it’s natural, she says, for senior figures to be present, both in the pitch and in the ongoing account relationship. What’s important is that the room shouldn’t be dominated by leadership. Clients need to meet the people who will actually be running their business on a day to day basis.
She’s equally clear that talent walking into a pitch shouldn’t assume they already hold the answer. Listening, in her view, is as important as talking – an opportunity to genuinely hear the marketing team and shape the pitch around what’s said in the room, not just what was prepared in advance.
5. Manage the process, not just the idea
One area of focus is how agencies run the pitch process internally, not just what they put in front of the client. This includes knowing when to let a team sprint and when to let it rest, and setting a clear vision for the pitch while giving teams the freedom to work within it.
But it also encompasses being able to demonstrate your methodology. For Tobi, how an agency arrived at an idea can matter as much as the idea itself, and sometimes more. If an agency can demonstrate the thinking and methodology that took them to their conclusions, it can often be enough to win even when the specific solution still needs tweaking.
Demonstrating that process, she argues, is not a secondary consideration to the idea – it’s equally important. The how carries as much weight as the what.
6. Let commercials support the value, not decide it
On commercial models, Tobi is firm on one point: pitch decisions shouldn’t be made on commercials alone. The ideas, the talent and the vision have to be right first, and the commercials then need to support that value.
Price, in other words, is there to reinforce the case an agency has already made – not to make it. She’s spoken in more depth elsewhere on commercial models and benchmarking, in Procurement vs Marketing: Who Should Own the Agency Selection Process?
The bigger picture: pitching is still hard, and that’s not going away
Even with the fairest process in the world, Tobi is candid that pitching remains a genuinely demanding undertaking for agencies, layered on top of day-to-day client delivery.
This is why AAR designs pitch processes that give agencies the right context, and a real opportunity to do their best work rather than wasting their time.
What wins, really?
For Tobi, a winning pitch isn’t decided by the strongest single idea in the room. It’s decided upstream, by whichever agency did the work to understand the brief behind the brief. It goes to whoever built a team that reflects that understanding, and showed – rather than told – a client what the relationship would actually be like. Chemistry, commercials and creativity all matter, but none of them are a substitute for that groundwork.
Not every pitch consultancy is positioned to help in the same way, Tobi notes. In her view, AAR’s strength lies in its independent role and the perspective it gains from working closely with both clients and agencies throughout the pitch process.
That dual perspective, combined with more than five decades of experience, means AAR understands the priorities, pressures and expectations on both sides of the table. Rather than advocating for one party over the other, its focus is on creating a fair, well-run process that gives agencies the opportunity to do their best work and helps clients make informed, confident decisions.
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.
