The Art of Winning in an AI Playground

How Analog Agencies Need to Adapt

I have always been a career advertising person within the Ad Agency business. Like many other agencies, particularly the mid-level independent agencies, I have had an up-close-and-personal relationship with the "Pitching for New Business" function in all my roles.

Back during those years following the Y2K, before we could even fully grasp its implications, the Digital Marketing revolution had started germinating around every corner of the business landscape, affecting the Ad Agency business too. As a result, an almost given responsibility every fortnight for our core teams was the churning of multiple strategy or creative pitches, in order to contribute towards improving the revenue bottom-line.

Beyond the Better Mousetrap

However, over the years, it slowly sank in among all of us that winning new business for an ad agency wasn't just about building a "better mousetrap"—i.e., a sharper strategy deck, a more creative pitch, or a slightly better ROI promise. Agencies that chased clients purely through superior technical execution often found themselves in a cycle of incremental gains, always needing to outdo competitors in the same functional dimensions.

As Douglas B. Holt critiques in his seminal work "Cultural Strategy":

Market innovation has long been dominated by the worldview of engineers and economists—build a better mousetrap and the world will take notice.

Similarly, like it was then, and as true as it is today, in agency business development, this means that winning clients isn't about proving agency capability alone — it's more about standing for something bigger, an ideology that deeply resonates with clients' ambitions and business vision.

The Risk of Commoditization

Agencies that get locked into transactional pitching, focused only on performance claims, risk commoditization, while those that build an identity around a compelling belief system, ...(click to continue reading)