Pay your shortlisted agencies a modest fee to pitch. For anything more substantial than a small project, the fee will produce a better commissioning decision than the unpaid version would.
This isn’t about politeness, or any moral claim about agencies deserving payment for their time. Unpaid pitching is one of the most reliable ways to make a worse commissioning decision than the one you’d otherwise have made. The buyer pays for it either way. The only question is whether the cost appears on your invoice, or sits buried in someone else’s overhead recovery, padded into the rate card you’ll be paying for the next three years.
What an unpaid pitch actually costs you
There is a persistent gap between what clients think pitches cost and what they actually cost. PM Society research found that 39% of UK clients believe the average agency spends under £5,000 / $6,000 on a pitch. Only 30% put the figure above £15,000 / $19,000. The reality, by the same study, was that 61% of agencies spent over £15,000 in internal time on a £200,000 / $250,000 pitch, and 41% spent over £25,000 / $31,000. And the trend is upward. The 2025 Cost of Pitching report from the European Association of Communications Agencies, publicly hosted by UAPR, cites Campaign and MediaSense data showing pitch costs rose 26% between 2022 and 2023. The same report puts the average new-business pitch at €43,804, roughly £37,000 / $46,000, and the average agency’s annual pitching spend at €650,937, roughly £550,000 / $700,000.
That money does not disappear. It comes back to clients as recovered overhead in day rates, in fees, in the structural margins built into every quote. The agencies that win the work pay for the pitches they didn’t win, and the clients that hire them pay for both. When the DBA writes that ‘if there are five agencies all producing the equivalent of £10,000 / $13,000 worth of creative work just to win a £40,000 / $50,000 contract, the loser is the design industry’, they’re half-right. The loser is also the buyer. The £40,000 contract is more expensive than it should be because every agency in the room has to cover the costs of all the pitches it lost this year. If you’ve ever wondered why agency quotes vary so much, unpaid pitch recovery is part of the spread.
There’s a second cost that doesn’t appear on any spreadsheet. The agencies most likely to decline an unpaid pitch are the ones with the most paying work in the diary. The agencies most likely to throw themselves at it are the ones with slack capacity, which is to say, the ones whose pipeline isn’t keeping them busy enough. Selection bias does the rest. Your shortlist tilts toward agencies with reasons to chase, and away from agencies with reasons to be selective. The quality of work in the room reflects who showed up, not who would have been the best fit.
What changes when you pay
A modest pitch fee, often discussed in the industry around the £5,000 / $6,000 mark, will not cover an agency’s full costs. The DBA notes that even a small creative pitch typically exceeds what a token fee compensates for. That isn’t really the point.
A pitch fee signals that you the agency’s time as worth something. That sounds like sentimentality. It isn’t. Agencies running a triage system, deciding which pitches to throw senior hours at and which to delegate down, treat your pitch fee as evidence that you are a serious buyer. The senior team turns up. The strategic thinking is real. The reference cases are genuine ones, not the closest analogue someone could pull from the shared drive in 90 minutes.
A pitch fee also changes the IP conversation. When you pay nothing and the agency presents an idea, the ownership position is awkward and largely undefined. You haven’t bought the work, so you don’t own it; the agency has shown it to you, so they can hardly bring an idea-theft action when something similar ends up in someone else’s deck. The risk isn’t theoretical. Once an agency presents unpaid creative work, it becomes difficult to prove where later ideas came from, especially if another supplier is then asked to develop a similar direction. A paid pitch removes that ambiguity by setting ownership or licensing terms before the work is shown. The agency owns the work unless commissioned. Or the buyer licenses ideas presented for a defined period at a defined rate. Or anything else clear and contractual. The whole grey zone disappears.
And a pitch fee forces the buyer to write a sharper brief. Putting £15,000 / $19,000 in front of three agencies has the side effect of requiring the procurement conversation upstream to be precise enough to justify the spend. Sloppy briefs survive when nobody’s getting paid. They don’t survive a finance director asking what you’re getting for the £15k. This is closer to what a proper discovery phase looks like than to traditional procurement, and it produces the same kind of benefit.
When free pitching is genuinely fine
Pitch fees are not a moral universal. There are scenarios where they’re overkill, and treating every supplier engagement as a paid procurement event is its own form of procurement theatre.
The clearest case is small projects. The PM Society’s research found that the threshold above which a competitive pitch is typically run sits around £55,000 to £85,000 / $69,000 to $106,000. Below that, the cost of running a pitch (yours, theirs, the time of everyone evaluating) starts to eat the value of the project. If you’re commissioning a £20,000 / $25,000 microsite or a £15,000 / $19,000 brand sprint, you don’t need a pitch at all. You need two credentials calls and a written proposal from the agency whose work, sector experience and rate card you already prefer. The DBA’s own buyer guidance flags this: credentials pitches, where no spec creative is requested, are appropriate at almost any budget level. At small project sizes, the question may not even be paid versus free pitching, but whether you need an agency at all.
Short timelines and low-risk briefs are the other place to skip the fee. An ecommerce site performance audit, a single-day strategy workshop, a Webflow rebuild of an existing site: these are scoped, definable, and don’t benefit from speculative creative. Agencies bidding on them will quote based on requirements, not differentiate based on conceptual work. There’s nothing to compensate them for because there’s nothing speculative being produced.
The last case is where the buyer has a framework or roster arrangement. If you’ve already paid for (or earned, through past contracts) the right to bring two or three agencies into a project, the work of selecting between them is closer to a scoping conversation than a competitive pitch. A token fee for that meeting would be an absurdity. Some procurement processes overcomplicate themselves by treating every selection as a fresh competition; if you have a roster, use it.
What a paid pitch actually looks like
For the briefs where a paid pitch is the right call, here is what we’d argue good practice looks like.
Fee size. In our view, between £3,000 and £10,000 / $4,000 and $13,000 per shortlisted agency, scaled to the depth of work requested. A 90-minute presentation with a strategy document warrants the lower end. A full creative concept with sample work, mood boards or a working prototype warrants the higher end. The £5,000 / $6,000 figure often cited in agency commentary sits comfortably in that range. Anything below £3,000 reads as gesture rather than serious contribution, and may backfire.
Shortlist size. Three agencies, four at the absolute outside. If you’re inviting six or seven agencies to pitch, you’re not running a selection process; you’re running a beauty parade. Credentials calls are free, and spec work isn’t. Use the chemistry stage to narrow to a final three before any money or any spec work is on the table.
Scope of the pitch. Define in writing what you want each agency to produce. Strategic recommendation. Sample creative direction. Proposed delivery plan. Whatever the actual decision criteria are. Vague pitch briefs produce vague pitches, which produce vague selection logic. Run the pitch you can actually evaluate.
IP terms. Pin these down in the pitch brief, not after the fact. The agency owns its work unless commissioned. Or the buyer licenses ideas presented for a defined period, at a defined rate, if not selected. Or any other clear and defensible position. Anything is better than the silent assumption that ideas presented in unpaid pitches are somehow available for borrowing.
Evaluation criteria. Share these with the pitching agencies in advance. The DBA recommends sharing the scorecard pre-pitch so that agencies can structure presentations against it. Buyers occasionally resist this on the basis that it ‘gives them the answers’. It doesn’t. It gives them the question, which is what you wanted them to be answering anyway.
The Pitch Positive Pledge, launched by the IPA and ISBA in May 2022 and backed by a long list of advertisers, agencies and intermediaries including Nestlé, Boots, Virgin Media O2 and Nationwide, doesn’t mandate pitch fees. What it does require is for advertisers to confirm in writing that a pitch is genuinely necessary, to consider the resourcing impact of what they’re asking for, and to provide structured feedback to all participants. It’s a behavioural commitment rather than a financial one. Buyers serious about good commissioning practice should treat it as the floor, not the ceiling.
The default test
The simplest way to decide whether to pay for a pitch is to ask one question. If you’re asking three agencies to produce work that, in any other context, you’d commission and pay for, you should pay for it here. If you’re asking them to turn up, talk through their relevant experience and demonstrate why they’d be the right partner for a project that will be specified after they’re appointed, you probably don’t need to.
The first scenario, run unpaid, is a low-quality competitive pitch dressed up as a fair process. The second scenario, run paid, is a procurement habit you don’t need. Most buyers are doing the wrong one of these for the brief in front of them, mainly because the industry has trained them not to think about it.