Show me the money. (Or at least give me a clue.)

Why keeping agencies in the dark about money rarely gets you better work

One of the best bits about being a client? It’s RFP/ pitch-time. You put a challenge out into the world and, a few weeks later, some very clever people walk into a room with fresh thinking, sharp strategy and ideas you hadn’t imagined.

It’s brilliant. I’ve been on that side of the table. And there’s something genuinely exciting about getting the cream of the crop of an agency’s strategic and creative thinking focused on your problem.

Now, having spent more time on the other side of that table, I understand something else. Just how much goes into it. Strategists interrogating the problem to come up with the one core insight they think you should address. A team of creatives exploring, unpicking discarding and refining concepts. Account leads and project teams coordinating teams and challenging the thinking. Graphic, motion expert, PowerPoint designers to make it sing. Subject matter experts – from behavioural science to AI – to add grit and substance.

Senior people review it (multiple times), debate it and suggest refinements. Late nights. Rehearsals. Rewrites. More coffee (or green tea – I’m a purist!) than I’m sure is medically advisable.

A good pitch isn’t just a PowerPoint deck. It’s a significant investment of people’s time, energy, expertise and, yes, investment.

Which is why there are few sentences more frustrating to hear after all of that than: “We loved it. But ultimately, it came down to budget”, particularly when there wasn’t a budget in the brief.

Show me the money

Jerry Maguire had it right. Well, sort of. I’m not suggesting every brief needs to arrive with a spreadsheet showing exactly what you have available down to the last pound, but please, please: give us something. A budget. A range. A band. A ceiling. Even a reasonably informed indication of where you expect the investment to land.

Budget isn’t something that gets in the way of creativity. It’s one of the things that shapes it.

Tell a brilliant agency team they have £50k and they’ll solve the problem one way. Give them £250k and they’ll solve it another. Give them £1m and the possibilities change again (if anyone does have £1m to spend, please do look us up ;).

None of those answers is necessarily better than the others. They’re simply answers to different questions and significantly shape the thinking that goes into the response.

Without that information, it’s like saying, “Plan me an unforgettable birthday party” without mentioning whether you had a cosy dinner for four or a private concert with Beyoncé at the Savoy in mind.

Both answer the brief. The invoices will most definitely differ.

“But won’t the agency just max out to whatever budget I tell them?”

I get it, I’ve been there. There’s a natural temptation to keep the number close to your chest. You don’t want the answer miraculously to cost £200k because you’ve said you have £200k.

But a good agency shouldn’t be asking for your budget to work out how much it can charge you. It should be asking so it can work out how best to use it. And if you don’t trust an agency enough to have that conversation, that’s probably telling you something more important about the potential partnership.

And while I’m on the topic, there is perhaps one thing even more frustrating than not knowing the budget…being told another agency has come in cheaper – and being asked to reduce your costs accordingly – without knowing what they’re actually proposing to deliver, because then we’re not comparing apples with apples. In fact, there are no apples. The apples are invisible!

Maybe it genuinely is better value. If so, that’s useful to know and agencies should be prepared to respond to it. But without understanding what’s behind the number, price comparison becomes just that: a comparison of two numbers, rather than two solutions. And that doesn’t necessarily help anyone make a better decision.

The industry is increasingly recognising this too

IPA and ISBA best-practice guidance calls for fair and transparent pitch processes, allowing agencies to understand client requirements and make informed decisions about where to invest their efforts. More recently, the IPA, APA and ISBA went further in their Production Pitch Process Initiative: briefs should have a viable budget, and pitches should be developed within it.

That’s not agencies asking clients to show their hand. It’s about reducing waste – on both sides.

Constraints can make the work better

There’s another reason I think budget transparency matters. Constraints are useful. Anyone who knows me, knows I (and the agency I work for) welcome a challenge. Some of the best strategic and creative thinking happens because there are boundaries.

If we know the parameters, we can make informed choices. Do we put more into the idea and less into production? Could technology help us do something differently? Should we focus on one audience rather than five? Would a smaller number of beautifully executed interventions have more impact than a large-scale programme? Could we achieve 80% of the impact for 50% of the investment?

Those are interesting strategic questions. And they’re questions agencies can only properly answer when they understand the commercial reality they’re designing for.

Otherwise we’re not doing justice to you or us. We’re putting a finger in the air and hoping for the best. And guessing is expensive

I should say, perhaps I should have said this earlier, that I love pitching. It’s one of my favourite parts of working in agencies. Pitching is healthy and I genuinely believe that competition (in the most part) challenges agencies to raise their game. It gives clients access to new thinking and different perspectives. I’ve benefited from that as a client and I still believe strongly in its value. But good pitches require serious investment from everyone involved.

The Pitch Positive Pledge from the IPA and ISBA was created partly in recognition of exactly that: better pitch behaviour can mean better work, lower costs and less waste.

So perhaps one small ask and contribution clients can make is remarkably simple: Tell us what you’re working with – just enough for us to understand the playing field.

Because if three agencies spend weeks solving a £500k problem and the available budget was always £150k, nobody wins. The client doesn’t get the best answer to the actual problem. The agencies invest significant time solving the wrong one and some potentially brilliant thinking ends up in a folder marked “Pitch_Final_FINAL_v117”.

So yes. Heartfelt plea – show me the money. It might just be the information that helps us give you our best work.