Back in the day, when life was simple and asking for a coffee didn’t involve a detailed assessment of your mood, pitch lists used to be load shorter. Most pitches still involve a long list (credentials) and then a short list – the pitch. But now, according to a number of agency heads I’ve spoken to recently, the credentials long list stage can involve up to 30 agencies. What a waste of everyone’s time. Apart from anything else, can you imagine being on the client team and sitting through 30 different sets of creds? You’d certainly forget who said what, and by the end of the process you’d be in such a bad mood you might decide to forget the whole damn thing. And for the agencies? Even a creds presentation can take about 10 hrs of time to put together properly (depends on the pitch I guess.) So after your 10 hours of prep you meet up with an angry, potentially suicidal head of comms, who frankly could no longer give a damn and is really thinking about what they’ve got for dinner! It’s a waste of time folks, for everyone. 8 at the long list, 4 for the pitch, that’s my advice. And if you reckon you need help on the process, including figuring out which agencies might be right for you, companies like the AAR can be useful. In “my day” the long list used to be anything from 5-8 agencies and then 3-4 agencies would pitch. Clients would choose the long list agencies from knowing their areas of expertise and matching these with their objectives. The incumbent and their closest competitor would be invited along, as well as a flyer or two to keep things interesting. You’d then get the agencies presenting a load of case studies and details of how they work at the credentials stage, followed by specific ideas at the pitch. The credentials allowed clients to look the agency in the eye and check that they knew what they were talking about. Roughly half the agencies were then invited back for the pitch. Easy. It all seemed to work OK. Some agencies moaned that they should charge for the time they took to pitch, everyone else said you can give it a go if you want (they didn’t) and we all went on our way.