Pitching sucks!
Pitching, loss leaders, spec work. Call it what you will. You win some, you lose some. The Foundry has some talented creatives and hence a healthy success rate. My sister Katie once asked me what pitching is. Since she worked in a shop that makes wedding cakes, I explained it to her like this:
Imagine that a person walks into your shop and says “I’d like to buy a wedding cake, but I’m not exactly sure what kind. Please come up with some ideas and make a small example of each of them for me, at no charge. I’ll eat a slice of each one, and *maybe* I’ll pay you to make the one I like best. Or perhaps I won’t – I may just take the recipe home and get my grandma to make it.” What do you think of that?
Katie replied with words to the effect of “they’d be laughed out of the shop”. This is how agencies work. I suspect it contributes substantially to the hourly rate that an agency chooses to charge for its services. Clients are, in part, subsidising the pitching process. They pay for those who didn’t pay.
Loss leaders baffle me too. In my limited experience, the only thing a loss leader leads to is more loss. Why would you imagine that a client who is too much of a deadbeat to pay you in the first instance, will ever come through? You’ve set a precedent with them, and they will always baulk at your quotes in future because you cut your own throat to start with. Why can’t you do that every time?
A particularly bitter irony of loss leaders is that often the bigger a client company is (and the more money they have), the more they expect for less money. Presumably this is in return for the prestige of being their agency. Never mind that your agency is on the verge of ruin, you’ve got [insert famous brand] in your portfolio!
… Yet these practices render having a portfolio completely pointless. Why bother gathering your best examples of work to demonstrate your talent, when you’re obliged to re-establish your credentials with every project?
In my naievety, I’d like to imagine that there is room in the industry for a different kind of agency. One that charges much lower rates and breaks a project down into smaller deliverables - but simply does not pitch.
Recent Posts RSS
January 29th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Loss leaders baffle me too. In my limited experience, the only thing a loss leader leads to is more loss.
If you’re talking solely about direct profit from the job, sure. But when you do work for a client there are many more aspects to it that are worth possible returns.
Work of mouth, case studies, exposure… all are worth $$ to a company when they pay off.
Take building up a portfolio in the first place, usually you’ll have to do a lot of discounted or spec jobs just for the ability to show them publically so you can pitch for paid work.
Spec and projects at a loss *can* be worth a serious amount of on-going work, the key is to know which jobs and for which clients to do those porjects at a loss, so one doesn’t end up burned.
There was a recent post about this on Digg, pointing to a post on Craigslist which was a heavy rant on companies wanting spec work and chastising anyone who did projects on spec.
Cue lots of designers patting themselves on the back and digging down anyone who tried to inject some reality into the situation and saying spec work can indeed be necessary and if you don’t like it, no-one is twisting your arm to take the jobs.
Frankly, the whole ‘no-spec’ BS smacks to me of the ‘hark at me, I am owed, world give me what I demand’ elitist attitude prevelant among web-folk. Nearly every other skilled career requires vocational training, often with no pay (Mechanic, Surgeon, Plasterer) but for some reason designers/web developers believe they should be excluded from this and that their talents should be recognised, when the truth is if they were half as good as they prattle on, they wouldn’t be advertising or getting approached by companies wanting spec work.
January 29th, 2007 at 3:49 pm
Oh please, Digg? Digg’s great. No, really. If you want to know what a bunch of 14 year olds think constitute important current events, Digg is your best bet. Currently riding high: Fart and don’t get caught. Strategy Game.
Word of mouth, case studies, exposure etc are products of a job well done, having nothing whatsoever to do with what was charged for the work.
I’ve never done freelance work for free for the sake of building up a portfolio.