Jessica Torstensson, Client Growth Director, Bench Media
Let’s be honest, the industry rarely says it out loud, but the pitch is, more often than not, a performance.
The tried and tested process has been the same for years: the brief lands, the agency mobilises, a crack team is assembled – senior strategists, the investment lead with the market relationships, the Account Director with the warm handshake and the right anecdotes, the deck is beautiful, and the thinking is sharp. And when the chemistry feels real, the agency celebrates the win, and then slowly, quietly, that team evaporates.
The senior strategist moves to the next pitch. The investment lead checks in quarterly, and the day-to-day gets handed to someone two levels junior, talented, but under-briefed, over- stretched, and working without the context that made the pitch sing.
Nobody says this is happening because the client doesn’t want to seem difficult, and the agency doesn’t want to seem under-resourced. So, both sides settle into something that has a name, even if nobody uses it: comfortable dissatisfaction. It’s one of the most expensive silences in business.
This is a conversation we’ve been having through Beyond the Pitch, an event series designed not to celebrate agency-client relationships, but to interrogate them honestly. What makes them
genuinely work? What makes them quietly erode? And what are we, as an industry, willing to admit about our own role in both?
A discussion point from the Series that resonated was: “Clarity is the shortcut to connection in the client-agency dynamic.” It sounds so simple, but in reality it isn’t, because clarity requires honesty, and honesty requires the kind of trust that most agency relationships never quite reach, because they’re too busy managing perceptions to build it.
So, what separates client/agency relationships that thrive from those that quietly flatline?
Here’s what I have learned:
Agencies spend enormous energy responding to briefs and almost no energy challenging them. A client who hands over a vague brief and receives a polished deck in return hasn’t been served, merely managed. The best relationships are built on the courage to ask uncomfortable questions before the work begins. What does success actually look like? Who’s the real decision-maker? What’s the media history, and what did it teach us?
Then there’s continuity. When a team that pitches is not the team that delivers, it’s not just a resourcing issue; it’s a signal. It tells the client that the relationship was worth performing for, but perhaps not worth sustaining. Clients almost always notice, but they rarely say so until they’re reviewing their roster.
The most enduring partnerships operate on a simple but underrated assumption: that the quality of the relationship is the quality of the work. When trust is high, briefs get better, feedback gets more honest, and the work stops being safe.
The tools are sharper, and the data is richer than ever. And yet the feedback we hear most consistently, from clients and agency leaders alike, is that something fundamental is still missing. Not capability, not channel access, not buying power, but connection. The kind that
requires both sides to stop performing and start talking.
While every agency worth its salt can tell a client exactly how a campaign performed across every channel and placement, most agencies are less practised at telling clients (and themselves) when a relationship is drifting and what it would take to correct.
While I would argue there is genuine optimism in agency-land that the conversation is shifting, it will only truly start to move when it begins to happen in the briefing room, the quarterly review, or at the moment when something isn’t working, and someone decides to say so.
As an industry, let’s debunk the pitch lie and start being the person brave enough to say when something is not working. Only then will the pitch process be the honest start to a long-term, enduring client/agency partnership.