Inside the pitch: what Australian procurement gets wrong about brand work

The Australian brand pitch is a piece of civic theatre that nobody admits is theatre. A request for tender goes out. Five agencies, or fifteen, are asked to demonstrate understanding, capability, cultural alignment, Indigenous participation, carbon reporting, and — almost always — a free indication of "how you would approach the challenge". The approach is strategy. The strategy is unpaid. The scoring matrix gives twenty per cent to price, twenty to methodology, twenty to personnel who will be replaced after the win, and enough to a case-study reel that everyone in the room has already seen at an awards night.

A winner is chosen. The work that follows looks surprisingly unlike the pitch, because the pitch was never the work. It was a compliance object designed to survive a panel, a probity adviser and a debrief letter. Procurement did its job as procurement understands it. Brand did not get done.

This is a practice problem with a buying problem on top. The Commonwealth Procurement Rules and their state cousins are not the villain. Treating brand as stationery inside those rules is the villain. You can buy a difficult service fairly. Australian buyers keep buying a show.

RFT theatre, scene by scene

The document is too long and the brief is too short. Forty pages of conditions, insurance, modern slavery, data, conflicts, and a statement of requirement that says "develop a contemporary brand identity that positions the organisation for the future". Contemporary is not a requirement. Future is not a category. An agency that answers that sentence with a confident methodology is performing. An agency that asks what must be true on the first Monday is being useful, and will often score as difficult.

Then comes the free strategy. "Respondents may include an indicative creative direction." May means must, if the other four will. So four weeks of unpaid positioning, naming, visual territory and a film that costs more than the proposed discovery phase. Mid-sized Australian studios carry this as a tax. Networks socialise it across offices. Freelancers eat it. The buyer receives five half-right strategies, none of which the organisation was ready to implement, and then scores the prettiest.

Personnel slides are fiction in a small market. The named strategist is on two other pitches. The designer lives in a different city. The Indigenous adviser is on a slide in half the submissions in this city this month. You cannot forbid people from being busy. You can stop scoring names as if they were a standing army. Score a method for who will actually sit in your rooms, and a contractual right to approve substitutions.

The presentation is a talent show. Lights, a narrative about the organisation that the organisation finds flattering, a moment of vulnerability about the category, a surprise guest. Public-sector rooms, which have been told to be careful, still melt for a surprise guest. Private-sector rooms do it and call it chemistry. Chemistry is real. It is also how you hire a room that is good at pitching and average at the work after the deck.

Price is a trick. The cheapest compliant bid has assumed fewer rounds, junior staff, and a brand portal instead of implementation. The expensive bid has assumed the implementation the RFT forgot to specify. The matrix treats them as the same object with different numbers. They are not. A cheap identity that dies in the printer queue is not value for money. It is a future project.

Free strategy is a market failure

Australian buyers have trained the market to give strategy away in order to be allowed to sell design, or to give design away in order to be allowed to sell media. The pitch is the loss leader. The relationship is the recovery. This produces two bad outcomes.

The first is stolen thinking, or thinking close enough that nobody will sue. Ideas shown in a pitch have a way of appearing, six months later, from the incumbent who sat in the room as an observer, or from an internal team that "took the best of the process". Probity does not prevent osmosis. Paying for a short, owned discovery does.

The second is agencies that get good at the gift and worse at the job. If your growth model is winning pitches, you hire pitch people. The account that follows is staffed by whoever is left. Buyers then complain that the A-team disappeared. The A-team was a pitch team. You designed that.

A fairer model already exists in adjacent Australian work. Architecture competitions sometimes pay a fee. Legal panels do not ask five firms to draft the advice for free and then pick a font. Management consultants, for all their sins, rarely produce the strategy as an unpaid annex to a stationery tender. Brand is asked to, because brand is still imagined as a look, and looks feel like they can be sampled.

If you want a sample, buy a sample. A two-week paid sprint on a real, narrow problem — a pack, a letter, a name shortlist, a template — will tell you more than a 90-minute anthem. It will also tell the agency whether you can brief. That information travels both ways.

Panels that flatten the work

Panel arrangements are rational. A department, a university, a bank, a retailer with a lot of business units, wants a pre-approved list so that every brochure does not need a new tender. The rationality ends when the panel is built as if all brand work were the same SKU.

A panel that lumps "creative, digital, brand, content, social, First Nations communications and graphic design" into one schedule will be used for all of those by people who did not sit on the evaluation. The firm that was cheapest for a brochure will be asked for a rebrand of a listed entity. The firm that was impressive on a brand system will be asked for a two-day social burst and will be expensive and resentful. The evaluation criteria, written for the brochure, will be cited as if they were a law of nature.

Secondary procurements then repeat the original sin at smaller scale: three firms from the panel, a week to respond, a free idea, a matrix. The panel was supposed to save time. It saves the first tender and recreates the pitch as a habit.

If you need a panel, split it by job. Identity systems. Campaigns. Writing. Media. First Nations-led work that is actually led, not decorated. Implementation and templates. Allow a buyer to go off-panel for a job the panel was not scored on, without treating that as a moral failure. A panel is a convenience. It is not a talent map of Australia.

Scoring matrices that reward the wrong thing

The matrix looks objective. That is its charm. It is also how a room avoids a difficult conversation about taste, risk and who will have to live with the work.

Typical weights: methodology, relevant experience, team, commercial, social procurement, presentation. Missing: evidence that the firm has shipped work through an Australian printer, a government template lock, a franchisee network, a call-centre script, a trade-mark process. Missing: a scored response to a real constraint — "this colour fails in the sun", "this claim will not pass legal", "this name is already a pub in Bendigo". Missing: a referee who is not a marketing director, but an operations person who had to use the thing.

Presentation scores are how theatre wins. A calm, precise response to a difficult brief will lose to a room that made the evaluation committee feel seen. If you must score the room, score clarity and the quality of questions, not the feeling. Better: do not score the room. Score the written response and a paid trial. Interviews can be pass/fail for whether you can work together.

Price scores without a common scope are fiction. Issue a scenario with a fixed set of deliverables and rounds, and ask for a price on that. Ask separately for rates. If you only ask for rates, the cheap rate will win and the change requests will recover the margin. Australian mid-market buyers still act surprised by this. It is the oldest move in the file.

Social procurement and Indigenous participation deserve to be real. They become theatre when they are a percentage in a matrix and a subcontract that is a name on a slide. If you want First Nations-led brand work, buy First Nations-led firms, or buy a protocol and a budget that does not treat culture as decoration. Do not award yourself an ethical score for a paragraph.

What a buyer can change without breaking the rules

You can write a brief that is a brief. The rules do not require vagueness. They require that respondents be treated fairly against a stated requirement. A stated requirement can be specific. It can name the surfaces, the constraint, the decision date and what done looks like. Specificity reduces theatre. It also reduces debrief arguments, because you can point to the thing you asked for.

You can pay for thinking you want to own. A funded discovery with a clear IP clause is cleaner than five unpaid strategies and a later argument about who thought of the word. If budget is the objection, cut the number of invitees. Three paid responses to a real brief will beat twelve unpaid fantasies, in quality and in total cost to the market. The second cost is real even when it is not on your ledger. It is how fees rise and how good studios stop answering your RFTs.

You can forbid speculative creative, in writing, and mean it. Some Australian government buyers already do. Enforce it. The first respondent who slips a film into the appendix should be asked to remove it, not rewarded for energy.

You can put an operator on the evaluation. A store manager, a call-centre lead, a records officer, a procurement lead who will have to print the templates. They will ask whether the system survives the panel printer. That question is worth more than a methodology chapter.

You can publish a realistic timeline. A three-week pitch over Christmas, or over EOFY, is a filter for firms that can put people on overtime. It is not a filter for quality. If your internal approvals will take six weeks after the recommendation, do not pretend the market can turn a brand system in four.

You can debrief with the matrix you actually used. Australian debriefs that say "another respondent was more aligned to our vision" teach agencies to guess visions. Quote the scores. Quote the brief. If you cannot, the process was not as fair as the paperwork claimed.

The room after the winner is announced

Procurement's job is not finished at the letter of award. The contract has to describe the work the pitch pretended to describe. Rounds, usage, kill fees, who owns unused routes, what happens when the named team changes, how a retainer will be governed if there is one. If those are left to goodwill, the pitch theatre continues as account theatre.

Tell the losers quickly, and do not keep a second place on an unspoken hook while you see whether the winner is cheap enough in negotiation. That hook is how you get a market that does not believe your process. Belief is an asset. Australian buyers spend it freely.

Then stop asking the winner to remake the pitch for the executive who did not sit on the panel. If that executive has a veto, they should have been in the evaluation, or the evaluation was decorative. Decorative evaluation is the private-sector version of RFT theatre. It is common in ASX companies that have a procurement process for show and a chief executive who will pick the room they liked. Write that down or stop performing the matrix.

Brand work can be bought well in this country. It happens when a buyer treats it as a professional service with a brief, a fair sample, a scope, and a score that matches the job. It fails when the organisation wants a feeling, asks the market to provide the feeling for free, and then uses a spreadsheet to pretend a feeling was a criterion. The spreadsheet is not the problem. The hunger for theatre is. Starve it, and the first piece of work might be the work.