Agency pitches are on the rise, but that doesn’t mean the majority of accounts in review are changing hands.

While defending business is certainly not new, there seems to be a recent trend of incumbent agencies successfully retaining their client accounts following a review.

Sixty-six percent of all new business reviews in 2022 ended with the incumbent retaining the account, according to the “Cost of The Pitch” report last year from the Association of National Advertisers and the 4A’s.

There have been several examples of agencies retaining accounts in the past year and change including independent shop The Shipyard successfully defended its San Diego Tourism Authority and Visit California accounts, both of which had been with the agency for over a decade.

How does an agency decide to defend?

For incumbents, it’s important to have an honest conversation with the client about why a review is being initiated before deciding to defend, and seriously consider if the relationship is going well, said The Shipyard Managing Partner Tammy Haughey.

“Are you doing great work that's solving business problems?” Haughey asked of incumbent shops. “Do you have really good relationships that allow you to have frank candid conversations to deal with issues when they arise? Do you have mutual trust and respect of one another at every level of the organization? Are you operationally [sound]? You could be a great creative agency and you could be winning awards but your operations are a disaster.”

If your agency is an incumbent with a truly good relationship with a client, you’ll probably know about the review ahead of time and have had a conversation about why the review is being initiated, Haughey said. That was the case with San Diego Tourism and Visit California, she said. This year, The Shipyard was behind Visit California's $32.8 million “Let’s Play” campaign, which highlighted the state as the ultimate playground and was the organization’s first brand-positioning change in more than a decade, according to the Times of San Diego.

The Shipyard has had San Diego Tourism since 2007. “There’s nothing broken,” said Haughey, but the client launched a review for the first time in 17 years because it wanted to make sure it was “getting the best all-around performance,” Haughey said. Visit California, the other account the agency defended this year, has gone into review every five or six years since 1998 when The Shipyard first won it.

Visit California is “funded by an industry referendum, so their budget comes from basically all of the different sectors that make up their revenue from tourism,” Haughey said, detailing why the organization does regular reviews. “So accommodations, rental cars, retail, restaurants, transportation and all those individual businesses are assessed an amount based on the revenue. And that assessment goes into Visit California's coffers to market. They have 16,000 stakeholders around the state that they’re beholden to, so they have a very rigorous way that they operate.”

Communication is key when one of your clients launches a review, and that is on the agency and marketer, said NBZ Partners Co-Founder Simone Oppenheimer Mandel.

“Just because an agency believes themselves to be performing well, doesn’t mean the client agrees,” Oppenheimer Mandel said. “We speak to countless clients who won’t give the same feedback to their agency that they communicate to us. That’s on the client for not being candid and transparent with their agency. And it’s on the agency to be proactive in asking for feedback and more importantly understanding the business trajectory.”

When do you pitch against an incumbent?

If it’s true that an incumbent has the upper hand in a review, it begs the question of why a new agency would throw its hat into the ring.

Take, for instance, the case of The Shipyard successfully defending Visit California since 1998 every five to six years. One might question why any agency would compete against that shop in that review.

“We’ve come up against some great agencies when we've pitched and, you know, we always walk out of those things with candid feedback from our clients about things that they saw that they were very interested in,” Haughey said.

Speaking to that case, Matt Ryan, CEO of Roth Ryan Hayes said he wouldn’t advise another agency to go up against The Shipyard. “You should not, when there’s a track record that is that long and that obvious,” he said.

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