Culture & Alignment · 6 min read

Ghost pitches are draining agencies dry

Clients should not take start-up agencies for a ride. The era of ghost pitches should end for once and all.

A pitch invitation arrives with a good brand name attached, an exciting project, and a promised response time of four weeks. That timeline is usually the first thing to go.

The pattern is familiar to most agencies who have chased new business from a client that does not respect the process. A request for a proper briefing call goes unanswered for two weeks. A set of clarifying questions, sent early and in good faith, comes back dismissed as irrelevant. Nobody explains why. Eventually someone admits, off the record, that the vague brief is the best the client team can produce.

Despite that start, a agency still puts a full team on it, across time zones, because the size of the opportunity makes it feel worth the risk. Due diligence, analysis, brainstorming, late nights, the arguments that any real strategic process involves. A four-week pitch stretches to ten. Two key people on the client side go out of office days before the pitch they had confirmed.

When the presentation finally happens, the reaction can be glowing: specific praise, a shared internal strategy deck that lines up closely with the agency's own proposal, a promise to confirm next steps within days. Then, on a weekend, a message arrives saying the agency did not make the next round. No reason given, beyond it being the team's decision.

Then, without warning, the story reverses again: a message says there was some confusion, and the agency is back in, asked to present to the board with ten days notice. The ten days become twenty-eight. The agency is now told it is one of three left, competing for what is billed as a final presentation to the owners, three days out. Weeks later, someone unofficially confirms the business went to another agency. No debrief, no explanation of what changed, no acknowledgement of the specific praise given weeks earlier.

None of this is a complaint about losing. Losing a pitch to a stronger response is a normal part of the business, and the decision to award work always sits with the client. What is not normal, and what is not rare enough, is a client organisation that cannot bring itself to make a phone call, answer an email, or give a straight reason when the news is bad, after asking an agency, often a small or founder-led one, to commit real people and real weeks against a brief the client itself could not clearly explain.

The cost of this is not abstract. A small agency that says yes to every brief because it is hungry for the work will burn through its people, its cashflow and its judgement, one drawn-out ghost pitch at a time. The discipline this actually requires is uncomfortable: declining to respond when a client will not engage properly at the briefing stage, before any work begins, even when the brand name on the invitation is a good one.

Clients should not take start-up agencies for a ride. Pitches deserve the same rigour clients expect from the response: a real brief, a real timeline, and the basic decency of a call, even to deliver bad news. The era of the ghost pitch should end. Agencies that keep accepting it are the ones extending it.

Topics: Agency Life, Client Relationships, Pitching