Pitch or handshake? Publicis and WPP split over how agencies win accounts

Two of the largest agency groups disagree in public about how big accounts should be won. On WPP's third-quarter call, chief executive Cindy Rose questioned appointments made without a formal pitch; on 5 November, Publicis Groupe answered with an open letter on Instagram addressed to her, as reported by Marketing-Interactive and confirmed by Campaign and MediaPost. Behind the exchange sits a question every agency owner faces: how much should it cost to win a client?

What happened

During WPP's third-quarter results call, an analyst asked about Coca-Cola's North American media review. WPP did not take part in that pitch. According to Marketing-Interactive, Rose said WPP had already been appointed in every market where it competed for Coca-Cola, and described the choice as one between spending another six weeks pitching for North America or delivering on the business it had already won. She then referred to rivals winning work without a pitch as a "CEO handshake thing" and warned that clients should not be encouraged to skip proper due diligence. "Nobody loves pitching. The cost and burden of the process seems to be increasing," she said, according to the same report.

Publicis replied with a post titled "Dear Cindy". According to Marketing-Interactive and Campaign, the group argued that skipping a pitch does not mean skipping due diligence: global clients, it said, test an agency for months before handing over data, media and technology operations. It also linked the result of the Coca-Cola review to capability rather than stamina. Publicis won PepsiCo's global media account in September, reportedly in key markets without a pitch, ending a relationship of more than two decades between PepsiCo and Omnicom's OMD, according to Marketing-Interactive.

The outcome of the Coca-Cola review, announced in October, gives the context: WPP kept most of the global media business, including most of Asia Pacific, Australia and New Zealand; Dentsu keeps Japan and South Korea; Omnicom won North America, according to the same source.

Why it matters

The formal pitch has been the default way large advertisers choose agencies for decades: a brief, a shortlist, weeks of unpaid strategy and creative work, and a decision. What both groups now describe, from opposite sides, is a market where that model is under strain.

On one side, the cost of pitching keeps rising. Rose's own words point to it, and a six-week process for one region of one client is a large commitment of senior people who are not billing anyone in that time. On the other side, a growing share of large accounts is being moved through direct appointments, consultative reviews or long evaluation periods that look less like a contest and more like a procurement and technology audit.

Neither model is free. A pitch concentrates the cost in a few weeks of speculative work. A pitchless appointment moves the cost earlier: years of investment in data, technology and client relationships that make an agency the obvious choice before any review starts. The disagreement between Publicis and WPP is, in practice, a disagreement about where that investment pays back best.

What it means for agencies and software vendors

For independent agencies, the lesson is less about holding groups and more about new-business economics. Three practical points follow from the exchange:

• Measure the cost of winning. Agencies usually know their utilisation and margin per client; it pays to track just as closely the hours, people and opportunity cost spent on each pitch. If the burden of the process is rising for the largest groups, it weighs even more on a 30-person agency.
• Decide which reviews to skip. WPP's decision on Coca-Cola North America shows that declining a pitch can be a deliberate choice to protect delivery on existing accounts. A clear rule on which pitches to enter, and when to walk away, is a margin decision.
• Build the case before the brief. If more accounts move without a formal contest, the agencies that win are the ones already embedded through data, technology platforms and results the client can verify. Certified expertise on the platforms the client runs, and documented outcomes, start to count as much as the creative idea on the day.

For software vendors, the same shift matters. When clients evaluate agencies through months of operational testing rather than a single presentation, the agency's command of the client's stack becomes part of the selection. Vendors whose partner programmes help agencies prove that expertise, through certification, shared case studies and access to sandbox environments, give their partners an advantage in exactly the kind of review that is replacing the pitch.

The public exchange between two holding groups will fade. The question underneath it, what an agency should spend to win a client and in what form, will not.

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