Agency reviews close before most shops hear about them.
Two very different buyers ask agencies to pitch. A public body publishes a marketing solicitation with scoring criteria and a fixed deadline; a brand runs an agency-of-record review through a consultant who tells you when it is nearly over. The first can be watched. The second leaves evidence before the invitation does.
- Instruments
- RFP, RFQ, RFI, agency reviews
- Buyers
- Public bodies, brands, and the consultants they hire
- Decided by
- Scored criteria in public, chemistry and credentials in private
What an agency is actually being invited into.
The word pitch covers five different processes with five different economics. Knowing which one you are in decides whether the right answer is a full creative response or a two-page credentials letter.
| Form | Opportunity type | What it is | When it appears |
|---|---|---|---|
| instrument: RFP | Public-sector marketing solicitation | A campaign, a communications programme or a media buy put out to competition by a government or public body, scored against published criteria. | Clustered around budget cycles and the start of a public financial year |
| instrument: RFP | Agency-of-record review | A brand competing its incumbent relationship, usually in rounds, often administered by a search consultant. | Typically on a multi-year cycle, and rarely announced anywhere public |
| instrument: RFP | Project or campaign brief | A single piece of work — a launch, a rebrand, an annual report — competed on its own without touching the retained relationship. | Irregular, and often the way a brand tests an agency it has not used before |
| instrument: RFQ | Rate card or roster appointment | A framework that appoints several agencies to a panel and then draws work from it, competed on rates and capability rather than on a creative idea. | Every few years, with call-offs running continuously in between |
| instrument: RFI | Credentials request | A shortlisting step asking who you are, what you have done and whether you are conflicted, before any brief is shared. | Ahead of a review, sometimes months ahead of the brief itself |
Where marketing work is published, and where it merely leaks.
Half of this market publishes on a schedule and half of it does not publish at all. The categories below cover both, and they are honest about which is which.
Public procurement portals
Government, education and public-authority marketing solicitations, carrying scored criteria and a hard closing time.
Marketing work is scattered across procurement categories — communications, outreach, media, creative services — so a single-category filter usually finds a fraction of it.
Institutional and cooperative buyers
Universities, health systems, associations and cooperatives, which competitively procure marketing more often than commercial brands do.
Their portals are individually small and separately hosted, so this is the category most likely to be watched by nobody.
Brand-side hiring and budget signals
A new marketing leader, a funding round, an expansion into a new market, or a posting for a role that only exists when a campaign is coming.
These are evidence of intent rather than an invitation, and treating one as a live pitch is how an agency burns goodwill.
Trade press and review announcements
Reporting that a brand has begun a review, appointed a search consultant, or parted company with its incumbent.
By the time a review is reported the longlist is often already drawn, so this category is better used to explain a loss than to find a win.
Contract and roster expirations
Public bodies publish what they awarded, to whom and for how long, which makes the end of a marketing retainer a matter of record.
An expiry is a date, not a decision. Some are extended, some are re-scoped, and a few quietly become an in-house team.
Why agencies lose pitches they were never going to win.
Unpaid pitching is the most expensive activity in this business, and the qualification questions that would have prevented it are almost always answerable in the first hour.
Category conflict
A brand will not appoint an agency working for a direct competitor, and the conflict is sometimes buried in a client of a client rather than in your own roster.
What the platform showsThe buyer and its sector are on the record from the moment it arrives, so a conflict check runs against your client list before a creative team is assembled.
Priced to a market you do not serve
Public marketing solicitations often publish an estimated value, and a shop built for one scale of retainer cannot profitably staff a brief written for another.
What the platform showsEstimated value and term are normalized onto the record, so a floor and a ceiling can be set once and applied to everything that arrives.
Free creative, framed as a requirement
Some briefs ask for campaign concepts, media plans or full creative territories as part of an unpaid round, which turns the pitch into a project delivered without a contract.
What the platform showsWhat the response is required to contain comes out of the document as a list, so the cost of entry is visible before anybody commits a team to it.
Named-staff commitments you cannot keep
Public buyers frequently score the team by name and hold you to it after award. Pitching your best people and staffing with your available ones is a compliance problem, not a resourcing one.
What the platform showsPersonnel requirements are pulled out of the instructions alongside everything else, and availability becomes part of the bid decision rather than a problem for delivery.
Incumbency you cannot see
A review with a satisfied incumbent and a single-source recommendation waiting behind it is a competition in form only, and the tell is usually in the award history.
What the platform showsAward records and expiry dates for the same buyer sit on the record, so a first-time competition and a fifth renewal do not look identical in the queue.
A search tuned for briefs you would take, at a size you can staff.
Agency work is described in language that changes by buyer — outreach, engagement, awareness, communications, brand — so the useful filters are the ones that describe the engagement rather than the vocabulary.
- Advertising, creative, media, public relations, digital, researchSeveral categories rather than one, because buyers file the same brief under whichever heading their procurement taxonomy offers.
- campaign · rebrand · agency of record · media buying · public awarenessKeywords work here in a way codes do not, since marketing rarely gets its own classification in a general procurement system.
- Retained · project · roster or panelA roster appointment and a campaign brief need different responses and different people, and a queue that mixes them triages both badly.
- Government, education, health, association, nonprofit, privateSector is the strongest predictor of how a marketing brief will be evaluated, and of whether the criteria will be published at all.
- A band matched to the size of team you can dedicateA band rather than a floor, because the briefs above your ceiling waste as much pitch time as the ones below your floor.
- Buyers competing with your current rosterExcluded at the search rather than at the review, so a conflicted opportunity never reaches the person most likely to be excited by it.
This search is not tuned to find agency-of-record reviews, because those are rarely published. Buying signals are the surface that finds those, and they belong in a separate list read weekly rather than daily.
What a marketing response is graded on.
Public marketing solicitations look informal and are scored formally. The administrative half below is where agencies most often lose points they never see mentioned in a debrief.
Strategic approach to the stated objective
Written to the objective the buyer published rather than to the campaign you would like to make, and structured so each scored criterion has an obvious home.
Named team with roles and time commitments
Who works on this, what they will do, how much of them you are committing, and which of them the buyer will actually meet.
Relevant work, chosen for likeness
Case examples selected because they resemble the buyer’s problem, audience or constraint — not because they are the ones the agency is proudest of.
Rate card and cost breakdown
Hourly or day rates by discipline, plus how pass-through media and production costs are handled, in whatever schedule the buyer supplied.
Insurance, indemnity and standard terms
Cover levels, subcontractor terms and any conflict declarations, all of which are pass-or-fail and none of which improve with a better idea.
Measurement and reporting commitment
What will be measured, how often it is reported and what happens when a campaign underperforms — increasingly scored, and rarely answered specifically.
The parts of the platform an agency uses most.
One list for published briefs, one for the evidence that a brand is about to move, and a drafting workspace that stops the same credentials being rewritten every fortnight.
Buying signals
Evidence of demand before a solicitation is published.
Marketing leadership changes, funding events and campaign hiring are the only warning most agency reviews give, and they are visible before the invitation is.
Response automation
Plan the outline, draft each section, compose the document.
Credentials, case examples and team biographies are the same paragraphs every time, so the writing effort belongs in the strategic sections that are actually scored.
Opportunity matching
Scored against your capabilities, with the reasons shown.
Fit for an agency is sector, size and conflict rather than a technical capability list, and the score shows which of the three carried the decision.
Analytics
Pipeline, win rate and where responses actually lose.
Pitch costs are real and unrecoverable, so the pattern in what you lose is the only thing that makes next quarter’s pitch list shorter.
A month on an agency new-business desk.
Two rhythms running at once: a daily queue of published briefs, and a weekly read of the evidence that a brand is preparing to move.
- stage: Standing
Roster and conflicts on file
Current clients, their sectors and their competitors are recorded once, alongside the service lines you sell and the size of engagement you can staff.
A conflict list the search can subtract, and a size band it can filter on.
- stage: Daily
The published queue
Public and institutional briefs arrive scored against the profile, with estimated value, term and sector already on the record.
A short morning list where everything left has cleared conflict and size.
- stage: Weekly
The signal read
Leadership moves, funding events and campaign hiring for target brands are reviewed together as evidence rather than individually as news.
A ranked outreach list, with the reason each brand is on it written down.
- stage: On shortlist
Read the brief as criteria
The scoring criteria, submission rules and required contents are extracted, and the response outline is built to match them section for section.
An outline where each part maps to something being scored, and a cost of entry.
- stage: Pitch window
Draft the strategic half
Credentials, biographies and boilerplate are pulled from the library; the strategy, the work and the measurement plan are written new.
A response whose new writing is confined to the sections that decide it.
- stage: After the decision
Record the outcome
Result, feedback and the criterion that lost it are captured against the record while the debrief is still fresh.
A loss pattern by sector and buyer type that shortens the next pitch list.
Further reading for agency new business.
RFPs
Published requests for proposal, soonest deadline first.
The published request-for-proposal directory, filterable down to the marketing and communications category rather than professional services at large.
Buying signals
Evidence of demand before a solicitation is published.
How evidence of intent is gathered and why it is never presented as a confirmed opportunity — the distinction this market lives on.
Response examples
Annotated sections, with the reasoning shown.
Worked sections annotated with the criterion they answer, which is the habit that separates a scored response from a deck.
RFP calendar
Closing dates, pre-bid meetings and question deadlines.
Question deadlines and pre-bid sessions, which in public marketing procurement are where the brief behind the brief gets explained.
Stop pitching the ones you were never going to win.
Load your client roster and the sectors you sell into, and let a week of published briefs and buying signals arrive already filtered for conflict and size.