Poor pitch practices are costing clients dearly according to the findings of a new report just published by agency selection specialist, Technology PR Services.
The 21-page report, “Technology PR Pitch Practices”, reveals that one third of PR briefs are inadequate and that in one in five pitches the process itself is seriously flawed. In more than half of pitches, an inadequate PR brief has caused delays to starting PR campaigns, and two thirds of the agencies surveyed say that they had been ‘miscast’ by potential clients.
“Many of the problems encountered by agencies in pitches are widely known”, says Chris Wilson, Technology PR Services’ Managing Director, “but their widespread nature means that perhaps clients are not taking the issue as seriously as they should – after all, a poorly run PR pitch doesn’t just cause annoyance to the affected agencies; it also means clients are not giving themselves the best opportunity of finding the most appropriate agency for their specific needs”.
In the report, 36.6% of PR briefs are rated as either ‘not very good’ or ‘poor’ and a similar number achieved an ‘okay’ rating. Relating to the pitch process itself, 18.9% of pitches were said to be ‘not very good’ or ‘poor’ while 33% were reported as ‘okay’.
The consequences can be significant as another set of statistics highlight: 37.3% of agencies claim that where the PR brief has been inadequate, it has taken between one and two months - after starting work on a new account - to establish the client’s true PR needs; a further 13.1% claim delays of more than two months.
“These are delays AFTER the agency has been appointed – in other words, after the client has started paying fees”, Wilson continues. “It’s a crazy situation. Clients are just throwing money away. The cost in terms of wasted PR fees must add up to hundreds of thousands of pounds across the industry”.
Agencies also say that prospective clients are not as diligent as they could be in identifying which agencies they should be talking to – nearly two-thirds of those surveyed say they were miscast by prospective clients ( invited to pitch when they failed to meet key criteria which should have been picked up through better screening prior to the review process). One in six agencies said they’d been incorrectly matched in half of their pitches, 11% claim to have been mismatched in between a quarter and half of their pitches and four in ten say they were miscast in up to a quarter of pitches.
The report is the result of responses from 73 PR consultancies in the UK with technology-based clients, and copies can be obtained by emailing info@technologyprservices.com.
