Why More Studios Are Charging for the Pitch Itself
By Tom James
Free pitching is getting rarer, and the clients are the ones who blinked first.
Manufacturing decided most of this, as it usually does. The tooling that survived set the limits, and the design worked inside them.
Tom James, who surveyed 62 studios and 20 clients, has been close to it from the start.
Background
Of 62 studios, 38 now charge a pitch fee, up from 9 in 2021. The median fee is enough to cover two weeks of one person's time.
The timeline tells its own story: eighteen months from first conversation to the point anyone outside the room saw anything, and then six weeks in which everything visible was decided.
The studios that still pitch free are mostly the ones competing for the same handful of large accounts.
We stopped asking for five routes when we started paying for them.
one client-side marketing director
The method
Of 20 client-side marketing leads, 14 said a paid pitch made the shortlist shorter and the work better, and four said it made no difference.
The reissue market rewards fidelity and punishes nostalgia, and the difference between them is usually a single component.
Reaction has split along predictable lines. The people who have to maintain it have the sharpest questions, and the fairest ones.
Asked what they would change, the team answers with process rather than product: earlier conversations, fewer assumptions carried over from the last job, and a willingness to lose an argument in the first week rather than the last.
Where it goes
The full data set is published alongside this piece.
