At TrinityP3, we have spent decades identifying and eliminating the systemic waste that plagues modern marketing. This guide is designed to help you navigate the complexities of Marketing Transformation, leveraging our full suite of services to build a high-performance marketing machine.

Part 1: The Transformation Mandate – From Chaos to Clarity

Marketing transformation is often mischaracterised as a purely digital project. In reality, it is the structural realignment of your marketing engine. Our Marketing Transformation services address the “four horsemen” of marketing inefficiency: fragmented data, redundant technology, misaligned structures, and opaque agency relationships.

1.1 Marketing Operating Model Design

The “Operating Model” is the blueprint of your department. If you are a Fractional CMO, this is your first lever. You must ask: Is our structure designed to follow our strategy, or are we just following habit?

• The TrinityP3 Approach: We don’t believe in “best practice” because best practice is often just “common practice.” We design bespoke models—whether centralised, decentralised, or a “hub-and-spoke”—that ensure speed to market.
• Case Study Insight: We recently worked with a global asset management group to identify a scalable digital platform and a long-term digital agency partner. By aligning their operating model with their digital transformation goals, we moved them from a fragmented local approach to a streamlined global standard.

1.2 Capability Mapping and Gap Analysis

Productivity dies when you have the right strategy but the wrong skills.

• The Service: We perform objective audits of your internal team’s capabilities. This allows a Fractional CMO to identify where “upskilling” is needed versus where “outsourcing” is more efficient.

Part 2: Optimising the Agency Ecosystem

The agency roster is often the largest source of “leaking” productivity. Managing fifteen agencies for a mid-sized brand is not “specialisation”; it is a management nightmare.

2.1 Roster Rationalisation and Alignment

• The Problem: Overlapping capabilities lead to “turf wars” and duplicated costs.
• Case Study: FMCG Roster Alignment. A major FMCG client was operating with multiple agencies on sizeable retainers that didn’t work together. TrinityP3 used a Composite Pitch process to realign the roster. The result was not just cost savings, but a significant increase in the speed of creative execution and brand consistency across channels.

2.2 The “Pitch” Reimagined

As detailed in our Definitive Guide to Agency Selection, the traditional pitch is a “theatrical” exercise that rarely predicts long-term success.

• The TrinityP3 Methodology: We facilitate workshops that simulate real-world collaboration. We look for Chemistry, Capability, and Commercial alignment.
• Case Study: Higher Education. We helped a university stress-test the market for a media agency partner. Because the organisation was undergoing rapid change, we customised a “Speedy Pitch” process that delivered a partner within weeks rather than months, ensuring no momentum was lost in their peak recruitment season.

2.3 In-House Agency Services

In-housing is a powerful tool for productivity, but only if it’s managed like a business.

• The Service: We help you build the operational framework for in-house units. This includes setting up the internal workflow, the remuneration models (often missing in-house), and the technology required to compete with external agencies.
• Case Study: Financial Services. We resolved complex in-house agency issues for a major bank where the internal team was being treated as “order takers” rather than strategic partners. By implementing a clear internal SLA and workflow process, the in-house unit’s output increased by 40% within six months.

Part 3: Commercial Transparency and Media Value

You cannot manage what you cannot see. In the world of media and production, opacity is the enemy of performance.

3.1 Media Transparency and Supply Chain Audits

• The Problem: In the programmatic era, “hidden margins” and “tech taxes” mean a significant portion of your budget never reaches a consumer’s screen.
• The TrinityP3 Service: We provide independent media audits and contract reviews.
• Case Study: Media Contract Assessment. We worked with a client to audit their media agency contracts. We discovered that the contracts had “dated” significantly, leaving the client exposed to non-transparent practices. By renegotiating these terms, we recovered nearly 15% of the media spend to be reinvested in working media.

3.2 Remuneration and Commercial Benchmarking

Are you paying a fair price? Or are you paying for senior talent while receiving junior delivery?

• The Service: We use our proprietary Ad Cost Checker and financial benchmarking tools to ensure your agency fees are market-aligned. This ensures the agency is fairly compensated (to attract talent) while the brand receives the value it pays for.

Part 4: Technology, Data, and Prioritisation

Modern marketing is a technology-led discipline. However, most CMOs inherit a “Frankenstein” stack of disconnected tools.

4.1 MarTech and AdTech Alignment

• The Service: We audit your technology stack to ensure it serves your strategy.
• Case Study: Beverages Sector. A leading beverages advertiser asked, “Do we have the right MarTech in our stack?” TrinityP3 performed a full structural and process transformation, validating their tech path and identifying redundant platforms. This resulted in an immediate 12% reduction in tech licensing costs and improved data flow across their social and sales channels.

4.2 Marketing Prioritisation

Few marketers have the budget to do everything. We help you choose what not to do.

• The Service: We use a prioritisation framework to rank marketing activities by their impact on business growth.
• Case Study: Business Opportunity Prioritisation. We helped three leading organisations map their marketing deliverables against business outcomes. By cutting the “bottom 20%” of low-impact tactical work, we freed up resources for high-growth strategic initiatives.

Part 5: The “Evalu8ing” Factor – Driving Performance Through Relationships

Productivity is a human endeavour. If the relationship between your team and your agency is toxic or dysfunctional, no amount of technology will fix it.

Relationship Tracking (Evalu8ing)

• The Tool: Our proprietary Evalu8ing platform measures the health of the marketer-agency relationship.
• The Impact: By identifying friction points early (e.g., poor briefing or slow approvals), we can correct the course before the relationship breaks down.
• Case Study: A regional marketer used Evalu8ing to align their global and local teams. By quantifying the “collaboration gap,” they were able to implement training that reduced project turnaround times by 25%.

Part 6: Leading the Future – Sustainability in Marketing

The role of the CMO now includes ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) oversight.

• Sustainable Marketing Practices: We help brands measure and mitigate the carbon footprint of their media and production activities. This is about future-proofing your brand and ensuring that your productivity gains are sustainable in every sense of the word.

Summary of Services for the CMO & Fractional CMO

The Path to High Performance

For a marketing leader, the goal is not to “save money”—it is to optimise the investment. Whether you are a Fractional CMO needing to deliver an immediate turnaround or a permanent leader building a legacy, TrinityP3 provides the data, the frameworks, and the independent objectivity to make it happen.

We don’t just find you an agency; we find you a partnership. We don’t just audit your media; we regain your control. We don’t just “do” transformation; we build a high-performance marketing engine.

Ready to start?

Visit our Marketing Transformation Hub to learn more, or explore our Case Study Library to see the results we deliver for brands every day. Interested in confidentially discussing how TrinityP3 can assist you? Contact us about any of these services. 

The post The Definitive Guide to Marketing Productivity: A Strategic Roadmap for CMOs and Fractional Leaders appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

John shares insights on how effective storytelling can create emotional connections, enhance brand recognition, and drive consumer engagement. The conversation also delves into the complexities of B2B marketing, the founder’s advantage in storytelling, and the need for consistency across different audience segments.

You can listen to the podcast here:

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We help sixty year old white bearded independent consultants living in Switzerland to do this.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please like, review or share this episode to help spread the wisdom from our guests each week.

Compelling storytelling is a vital business skill. As we have discussed previously, many brands and agencies would describe themselves as excellent brand storytellers. My guest today believes that many brands are making a big mistake in the storytelling process by focusing purely on the consumer’s perception. Instead, he recommends that brands and their agencies should use “story building” when developing and telling a brand story.

To explain the difference between storytelling and story building, please welcome the author of the book Story Building: Your Brand from Their Standpoint, John Elbing. Welcome, John.

John Elbing:

Hi Darren, I’m very happy to be here and to talk about my favourite subject: storytelling. Well, story building, actually.

The Human Need for Stories

Darren Woolley:

Well, let’s start with storytelling before we get into the distinction between the two. From my perspective, storytelling is such an important human skill because it really is the way that we passed on knowledge for thousands of years before the invention of the printing press. Oral history was the way that human beings could pass on learnings and knowledge from one person to the next. It must be part of the very existence of being human—the ability to tell stories.

John Elbing:

I’m completely convinced. I think our brains evolved by processing stories, so we’re programmed to connect with them. We transfer information, but we also transfer emotion. We connect, and it is always through a story. There are too many people that try to talk about data and facts to convince people, but actually, the story is what connects.

Darren Woolley:

I wonder when in human history we suddenly re-locked this door and started to think that facts and rationality were the most compelling way of communicating, or even more importantly, persuading someone to a particular perspective. Storytelling has quite an emotional component which, as we know from behavioural psychology, is essential in engaging the audience and swaying their opinion.

John Elbing:

Yeah, I don’t know. It could be something around the Industrial Revolution when suddenly things were being systemised—Taylorism and all those things where it’s all about money, KPIs and ROI. But then you watch a show like Mad Men, and it’s all about stories.

Discovering the Power of Story Building

Darren Woolley:

Exactly. So John, when did you first start to realise the power of stories, or when did you start to really become interested in storytelling?

John Elbing:

I’ve been coaching startups and I got into a lot of methodologies. I studied design thinking, I have 100 different canvases and I use a lot of post-its. I would go into very specific exercises with companies and they would come out with all this insight and “shiny eyes”. And then Monday morning, they weren’t quite sure how that fit together or what to do.

I started reading about storytelling and I realised that forcing them to create a story—because stories are formulaic and have a framework—requires you to put things in a certain order. Suddenly they had to decide. Before, it was, “Hey, we do everything for everyone and it’s great”. Suddenly you have to say, “No, we’re talking to these people and not to those people”. You have to decide what is important and what is less important. Getting someone to admit some of their features are less important really creates a sense of focus. Before they even use the story for marketing, it serves them internally by creating coherence about what they are doing.

Darren Woolley:

It’s proven that story is the way we make sense of the world or concepts. I think a lot of people think that stories are just something that you tell, and the danger is it becomes more like a list of features than a cohesive, structured story.

John Elbing:

They say that there’s only about seven stories in the world; all the movies and novels you ever read can be boiled down to a certain number of structures that work, like “rags to riches”. Those formulas get us caught into fiction, but they also help in other kinds of communication.

The Methodology: Recognition, Perception and Projection

Darren Woolley:

When you’re working with a startup and the founders have come up with a story, what is the structure that you’re looking for?

John Elbing:

I’ve developed a methodology—not something completely new, as I’ve stolen from everywhere until I found something useful. One answer is the emotional part: as a listener, am I engaged in this story or does it look like a catalogue?

Part of the book is a mental model for when you encounter a brand. First, you have to recognise yourself in the brand. Only if you think, “They work with people like me,” are you going to look at what the offer is exactly—that is perception. Then, even if you’re interested in the offer, there’s a moment of doubt where you project yourself into what it’s going to be like.

I call that Recognition, Perception and Projection. Often companies only do “perception”—they only do the “here’s my product” thing. It’s up to you to figure out if it’s for you and to imagine what it’s going to be like. That creates so much hesitation. If I don’t recognise myself in your brand, I’ll just skip. You’re just one click away from your competitor.

The idea is to tell your customer’s story. They recognise themselves, imagine what it will be like and they think of this positive future. If you can build a story that brings people through those natural steps, you’ll get the right people to connect at the beginning because the story says, “We work with this kind of person”. If you don’t recognise yourself, you’re probably not the right client, which is a good thing—it leads to a better quality pipeline.

Selling a Transformation

Darren Woolley:

It’s interesting, this idea of recognition—that people can recognise something relevant to them. In advertising, there was always this idea of being “aspirational”—that the audience may be mid-market, but by adding this brand to their life, they can be transcended up to something better.

John Elbing:

I would put it this way: you walk down the street wanting a drink with a friend and you walk by some cafes without slowing down, but for others you say, “Ooh, that’s for me”. Recognition is a mix of your identity, aspirations and challenges.

If I’m an independent consultant looking for a CRM and a website says, “We’re the best CRM for teams,” they lost me immediately because they don’t work with people like me. Later in the story, there is the idea that we’re all selling a transformation. Look at the problems we solve, but then imagine what it’ll be like to step up. I’m not selling you a suit; I’m selling you the fact that you’re going to be a professional.

Darren Woolley:

You’re becoming a barista! No, I like the idea of transformation because Hollywood movies always have characters that start in one place and, through the telling of the story, transform into a better or different person. In advertising, that’s always, “Your life will be better, happier or sexier”.

John Elbing:

A lot of it can be translated into emotion. You won’t necessarily be rich, but you’ll be confident. At the beginning, you’re frustrated with your situation, and at the end, you’re going to be relieved. I’m not selling you a financial service; I’m selling you peace of mind instead of worry.

Story Building vs. Storytelling

Darren Woolley:

How would you define, in an elevator pitch, what story building is versus storytelling?

John Elbing:

Storytelling has become a buzzword and often boils down to how to tell your story better—putting a nice coat of paint on it. Story building is asking: what story should you tell?

In the book, I use a series of canvases where we step into the customer’s shoes to understand their aspirations and challenges. Then we look at the company and how it matches that to build the customer’s story. The sequence is important: you have to get them to recognise themselves first, then they’ll be interested in why you are different and what your offering is.

Then they think, “Yeah, but that’s going to be complicated. What is it going to be like?”. If I have a great CRM but I imagine I have to copy-paste from Excel and find things in my email, I won’t come back. If you can bring them through what it’s going to be like and how easy it will be, they’re already primed for the relationship. Once you’ve figured out the sequence, it can be a pitch, a website or a campaign.

Darren Woolley:

I find storytelling works very well as a sales technique when you’re one-on-one, because you can customise it to visual cues and insights from the conversation. It must be more difficult when the story exists in space and time, like a website.

John Elbing:

Well, I’ve found that’s the case. If I land on a website that says, “We help 60-year-old white-bearded independent consultants living in Switzerland,” I’m going to think, “Ooh, that’s me!”. If it’s too vague, I’ll probably skip because our attention span today is like a goldfish. A website that describes your ideal customer makes them feel seen.

You need a story for your company, but then you can have stories for specific segments or product ranges. Look at Nike—”Just Do It”. They target people who buy sneakers to run and people who buy them to look cool. Those are actually the same person—a 20-year-old student who has one pair to run and one pair to look cool. “Just Do It” connects with both because it’s an aspiration you can bring into any part of your life.

Putting the Customer Behind the Wheel

Darren Woolley:

The structure of Nike is about effort, focus and being victorious. They are very good at showing well-known sports stars as being very human, showing their foibles as well as their strengths.

Car advertising is similar; it’s not just the product, but those driving shots in beautiful scenery with perfect lighting. It puts you behind the wheel. It’s very much about “Projection,” isn’t it?

John Elbing:

Exactly. Whether it’s a family car or a sporty one, people think, “Ooh, that’s me, I could drive like that”. Even a telco website will show happy people having a picnic in a park. What does that have to do with the telephone? It’s saying, “Clients of this company look like that—they look like me”. You won’t project yourself into a picture of a building; people are important.

Owning a Category and Niche Positioning

Darren Woolley:

And then the “Perception” part is the fact that telcos are all about connection in the 21st century. So, it’s: Recognition (it’s relevant to me), Perception (here’s the promise) and Projection (I want that).

John Elbing:

People also want to put you in a box to compare you to something. If you own a category, that is a very powerful position. Think of energy drinks—Red Bull owns that category with a 50% market share. I do story building, not storytelling. Being different is important because there’s so much offer out there. If you say, “Normally it’s like this, but we do it differently,” that helps you stand out. I’m not sure companies talk about their difference enough.

Internal Alignment and the Trojan Horse of Strategy

Darren Woolley:

So, what is the emotional part of story building? What does it make people feel that gives it a benefit over storytelling?

John Elbing:

When I work with companies, I’ve found two ways this works. Some companies are in a hurry for a marketing message after a merger or a new product launch. We build one that’s structured, but story building is a bit of a “Trojan horse” for positioning strategy. They step back and realise, “Actually, we’re talking to these people, and we can niche down”. Others come in specifically to rethink their positioning, and I use story building as the tool. There are often “aha moments” where they see the structure and realise, “Yes, that is my customer”.

Darren Woolley:

What’s the emotion?

John Elbing:

It depends on the stage of the company. Established, 80-year-old companies see themselves from the “inside out”—they say, “I do this, isn’t it great?”. When they flip the script and look at themselves from the customer’s standpoint, they see how they fit into that world. It gives them focus and excitement.

Darren Woolley:

Your book’s subline, “Your Brand from Their Standpoint,” is really the promise. Story building starts with the customer and builds back in. Everyone wants to think their business is customer-centric, but it rarely is. When you’re inside the factory looking out, it’s very hard to look back in as a customer.

John Elbing:

Exactly. A side effect is team alignment; they build the story together. I had a company where 10 customer-facing people had 10 different answers for what they did. By working through this, they built a common story. One guy said, “I can finally tell my mum what we do here!”.

Story Building in B2B and Complex Organisations

Darren Woolley:

In B2B, there are a lot more people involved in decision-making, from the CEO down to operations. How does that complexity impact Recognition and Projection?

John Elbing:

Usually, we follow the value chain. You might be selling something to a company so they can better serve their own clients. You show how the end customer can be happier, which makes the person serving them better off. In sales, you can have a tech story, an ROI story and an operational story—all using the same structure. I’ve even done this with startups talking to investors; the company becomes the product and the investor becomes the customer. You can even use it with your spouse when deciding between the mountains or the beach!

Darren Woolley:

Where is the anchor for consistency across all these different stories? It has to be in “Perception,” right?

John Elbing:

Partly it’s a “proxy recognition” where you recognise your customer. If I’m selling to a business, I say, “Your customer has this problem, and we can help you help them better”. Or, for a tech person, you address their specific worries about security or privacy within the bigger story. You make them the hero because they set up a system that works.

Overcoming Internal Resistance

Darren Woolley:

Do startups get the story faster, or does size not matter?

John Elbing:

Size doesn’t matter. I’ve worked with deep tech startups where founders are so focused on the technical solution that they talk about their amazing AI but miss the story. Established companies often have “drift”—they’ve been telling the same story forever and it’s not the right one anymore.

The biggest hurdle is that a company is not the hero of the story; the customer is. You are just the guide—the Yoda to their Luke Skywalker. Getting them to shift that perspective and have that humility when they are so proud of what they do can be a challenge.

Darren Woolley:

Any “red flags” when talking to an organisation?

John Elbing:

If they have a rich customer experience, there are stories to tell. If I’m a plumber, the story might be as simple as, “We’re on time,” because the customer’s worry is having to take a full day off work.

I once worked with a nonprofit in water purification. They thought their problem was “people getting sick,” but we realised the actual problem they solved was “trucks getting stuck in the mud”. What keeps the customer up at night is often something different than what the company thinks.

Darren Woolley:

It’s been a fantastic conversation. Thank you, John Elbing, author of Story Building: Your Brand from Their Standpoint.

John Elbing:

Thank you, Darren.

Darren Woolley:

One last question before we finish: what’s your favourite brand story of all time?

The post Managing Marketing: Storybuilding As A Technique For Building Brand Stories appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

Trust in the pitch isn’t earned, because three hours of polished theatre isn’t enough time to prove character. And it isn’t a gift, because no marketer hands over a multimillion-dollar budget as an act of charity.

In reality, trust is a loan.

It is a professional line of credit extended by the marketer to the agency. The pitch isn’t the finish line where the trophy is handed over; it is simply the credit check. The moment the agency is appointed, the agency isn’t “set”, instead they are in deep “trust debt.” The success of the partnership depends entirely on how the agency chooses to repay that debt, and how the marketer manages the “interest” during the onboarding and the inevitable crises that follow.

The Myth of the “Earned” Pitch

Agencies love to believe they earn trust during the tender process. They point to their strategic rigour, their creative flair, and the fact that they managed to get the transition plan into a tidy PowerPoint. But let’s be honest: a pitch is a performance. It is a highly curated, rehearsed version of reality, no matter how hard we try to make it more like a test drive.

As a marketer, you aren’t seeing how the agency behaves when a server goes down at 2 am or how they handle a creative director’s mid-year burnout. You are seeing their best selves. You can’t “earn” life-long trust in a boardroom any more than you can earn a mortgage by wearing a nice suit to the bank. You are merely proving you are a “good risk.”

The marketer is the lender here. By selecting an agency, they are taking a significant portion of their own professional capital – their reputation within the business, their job security, and their brand’s health – and “loaning” it to the agency. This is a high-stakes transaction where the agency starts with a balance to settle.

The Marketer’s Responsibility: Setting the Terms of the Loan

If trust is a loan, then the marketer acts as the bank manager. And just as a bank shouldn’t lend money without a clear set of terms, a marketer shouldn’t enter a pitch without a framework that allows for a genuine assessment of “creditworthiness.”

This is where many tenders fall over. If the environment is purely transactional, or worse, adversarial, the marketer isn’t actually assessing trust; they are assessing survival instincts. To move beyond the theatre, the marketer must create an environment where the agency’s true character can be glimpsed.

This is why we developed the TrinityP3 Tender Charter. It isn’t just a set of rules for “being nice”; it is a framework for professional integrity. When a marketer commits to a transparent, fair, and respectful process, they are effectively setting the “interest rate” for the trust loan.

The Charter ensures that the agency has the information they need to be honest. If the marketer is secretive or shifts the goalposts mid-pitch, they are forcing the agency to “over-borrow” on trust just to stay in the game. A fair process allows the marketer to see if the agency is willing to be a partner or just a vendor looking for a quick win.

The Onboarding Phase: Making the First Repayments

Once the appointment is made, the agency enters the “repayment” phase. The mistake many agencies make is thinking the hard work is over. In truth, the first ninety days are the most critical period of debt collection.

During onboarding, every interaction is a micro-repayment. Does the agency meet the administrative deadlines? Do they take the time to learn the internal politics of the client’s organisation? Do they respect the brand guidelines that were “loaned” to them?

In this phase, “interest” is paid through reliability. The marketer is watching for the first sign of “default.” If the agency promised a senior team during the pitch but shows up with juniors on day one, they have effectively missed their first payment. The trust line of credit is immediately slashed, and the marketer moves into “defensive” management mode.

The First Crisis: When the Debt is Called In

In the lifecycle of any agency relationship, there will be a moment when the “market crashes.” A campaign fails to move the needle, a competitor launches a devastating counter-attack, or a PR nightmare erupts.

This is the moment the trust loan is truly tested.

Philosophically, this is where the “principal-agent problem” rears its head. The agency (the agent) wants to protect its fee and its reputation. The marketer (the principal) wants to save the brand. If the agency hides data, shifts blame, or goes silent, they are defaulting on the loan.

However, if the agency leans in with radical transparency – saying, “Here is what went wrong, here is the cost, and here is how we fix it” – they are paying back the loan with high-value interest. Trust is solidified not when things are going well, but when the agency proves they are willing to sacrifice their own short-term comfort for the marketer’s long-term health.

The Risks of “Zero Trust” Procurement

We also have to acknowledge the opposite extreme: the “Zero Trust” environment. This is often driven by procurement departments that treat agencies like office furniture. In these scenarios, the “loan” is so small and the oversight so heavy that the agency has no room to breathe.

When a marketer treats an agency as an untrustworthy debtor from day one – demanding exhaustive audits of every hour spent and refusing to share business-critical information – the agency stops being a partner and starts being a servant. You cannot expect a high return on a loan if you never actually let the borrower use the capital.

The TrinityP3 Tender Charter explicitly guards against this. By advocating for a “value-based” rather than “cost-based” approach, we encourage marketers to give a significant enough loan of trust that the agency has the “liquidity” to be creative and proactive.

How to Balance the Books

At the end of the day, a healthy marketer-agency relationship is one where the books eventually balance. Over time, as the agency pays back that initial loan through consistent performance and honesty, the “debt” fades and a genuine partnership emerges.

But we must stop pretending that this happens in the pitch room. The pitch is merely the signing of the loan documents. The agency leaves that room with a massive obligation to the marketer’s brand and reputation.

For the agency, the message is simple: Don’t treat the win as a gift. Treat it as a debt you must work every day to repay.

For the marketer, the responsibility is equally clear: Use a framework like the Tender Charter to ensure you are lending your trust to the right people, and then give them the space to pay you back with the interest your brand deserves.

After all, in this industry, the only thing worse than being in debt is being a bad lender.

Read more on creating high performing client / agency relationships, with our free guide. Discover how we can help you create and manage high performing teams. Or for a confidential, no-obligation discussions about your client / agency challenges contact us today.

The post Why Trust in the Agency Pitch is a Debt, Not a Gift appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

TrinityP3 is not always known for tech advisory. However, over the past few years we have been helping clients navigate the often-murky world of martech that can be skewed by vendor self-interest and agency preferred partnerships.

This APAC real asset manager and developer client had successfully transformed its digital ecosystem in Australia and New Zealand and now wanted to scale the capability globally for the next stage of its marketing strategy.

It was seeking an objective view to make the right decision in moving forward.

The Strategic Requirements

To achieve global alignment, it needed to determine if its existing headless CMS was the “future-proof” foundation required for a unified global rollout, or a legacy constraint in the making.

The goal was ambitious: a centralised global platform capable of maintaining strict brand governance while empowering regional teams with localised content and seamless asset database integrations.

To support their global footprint, the platform had to excel in six critical areas:

1. Global Brand Governance: Consistency across all regions.
2. Operational Efficiency: Intuitive publishing workflows for non-technical users.
3. Data Integration: Robust connectivity with CRM and proprietary asset databases.
4. SEO & Architecture: Sophisticated URL structuring for multi-region discoverability.
5. Granular Analytics: A dual-view approach (local vs. group-level performance).
6. Compliance: Enterprise-grade permissions and audit trails.

The Solution

Rather than simply assessing the current tech stack in a vacuum, we implemented a rigorous, tech-agnostic market review.

We developed bespoke inclusion criteria to filter the market, ensuring the business only evaluated platforms that were fit-for-purpose, budget-aligned, and scalable.

Then compared the incumbent against a curated set of competitors. This way we could help move the conversation from “features” and “tech fit” to “business impact” and “strategy alignment”.

The Process

We embarked on a 6-week audit and assessment process that combined market best practice with our agnostic lens to ensure the desired future state could be achieved.

The Result

The review revealed a common martech paradox: while most platforms could technically meet the requirements, the limitations and trade-offs varied between architectures.

Our independence allowed the client to look past vendor generalisations and identify hidden technical obstacles. Helping them get beyond the sales pitch and lift the hood on the most relevant features to determine the degree of best fit.

We identified clear “must-have” versus “nice-to-have” functionalities that saved the client from over-investing in unnecessary areas. And shifted the focus from upfront licensing to the long-term cost of localisation and maintenance.

Equipped with a clear comparison and performance benchmarks, the client is now in the final stages of Total Cost Analysis and selection, confident that their chosen solution will support their global growth for years to come.

The post Digital capability audit for APAC real asset manager and developer – Case Study appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The TrinityP3 State of the Pitch report has shone a light into the pitching process as it is practiced and revealed what many feel, but few could articulate. That is the problem with pitching is it is not broken as some maintain, but it is suffering often from poor management and even worse behaviour, particularly by a few procurement professionals and marketers.

But just how bad is this behaviour? Surely some of the reports of poor time management down to outright rudeness is a huge exaggeration. Ellie went behind the scenes to a few agencies who were in the pitch process to see first-hand and report back. 

What she shares highlights the need for a behavioral reset in how agencies and marketers interact during pitches, emphasizing the necessity for a fair and reasonable process that respects the efforts of all parties involved.

You can listen to the podcast here:

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I just wish they’d take the brief, go away, solve it, and come back.

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley:

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.

The Trinity P3 State of the Pitch report has shone a light into the pitching process as it is practised and revealed what many feel but few could articulate. That is that the problem with pitching is that it’s not broken as some maintain, but it is suffering from poor management and even worse behaviour, particularly by some procurement professionals and marketers. But just how bad is this behaviour? Surely some of the reports of poor time management down to outright rudeness are a huge exaggeration.

To find out the reality of pitches, we sent an undercover pitch consultant behind the scenes to a few agencies who are in the pitch process to see firsthand and report back. We’ve changed her name to protect the agencies and the clients involved, but she is here to share with us the good, the bad, and the ugly of agency pitching. Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, Ellie Angell. Welcome, Ellie.

Ellie Angell:

I feel like there’s been an error in that intro somewhere, Darren. You’ve kind of disrupted my undercover status there, but never mind.

Darren:

You’ve been unmasked, Ellie.

Darren:

It’s a terrific idea because there are a lot of stories flying around the industry. It’s amazing how many times you hear stories about pitches that you think just can’t possibly be true. And yet, actually going behind the scenes and being in these agencies when they’re in the middle of a pitch must have been incredibly illuminating.

Ellie:

Just to give some context, this idea came from the State of the Pitch survey that Trinity P3 does. We’ve seen the downward trend of those scores in those surveys. And those surveys are objective, looking at consultants running pitches, marketer-run pitches, procurement-run pitches. But of course, from our perspective running these pitches, we only run a certain amount in the market. So I wanted to go behind the scenes to see pitches that we weren’t involved in, to see exactly the kind of thing that was happening.

I’ve worked in agencies before, so I don’t think any of these stories are going to be new to anyone who’s worked in agencies, but they are quite profound in terms of the behaviours that we see and some of the massive hoops that agencies are having to go through more and more as time goes on.

Darren:

Just to be clear, the marketers that were running these pitches or the procurement professionals running these pitches would not have been aware that you were behind the scenes.

Ellie:

That’s correct, that’s exactly right. Of course there can’t be a conflict of interest, and these weren’t pitches that Trinity P3 had any involvement in. No one was aware that I was there other than the agency staff involved in the pitch itself.

Lack of Clarity: What Are We Pitching For?

Darren:

We need to protect the agencies because clearly in most cases of a pitch, there’s an NDA. So let’s have this conversation without identifying any of the agencies or the marketers. generally, what were these pitches like? Were they for agency of record? Were they projects? Or was it a real mixture? 

Ellie:

It’s kind of an interesting place to start because one of the things I’ve heard consistently is that some of these clients just weren’t actually sure of the answer to that question. It seems like a basic question: What are you actually hiring for? But as some of these pitches progressed—and I’m not even going to divulge whether this was a media or creative agency—this question of “Is it project, retained, or AOR?” kind of fluctuated through the “process”.

There was a lack of process, a lack of briefing, and a lack of clarity. In at least one of these pitches, the goalposts were moved in that regard midway through the process. Which, after all of the effort that the agency puts in and the IP that the agency gives in a pitch, seems unreasonable at best. For God’s sake, let’s understand exactly what the outcome is supposed to be and not move on that midway through.

Darren:

I just want to pick up on the effort agencies put into responding. A lot of times I’ve heard marketers, and particularly procurement teams, talk about, “Well, it’s not that hard. You have to fill in some forms and do a presentation.” But there’s actually a lot of emotional energy put into these as well as the physical effort.

Ellie:

There’s a huge amount of emotional energy. It’s people who have invested their time and their expertise, and they feel that their expertise is being judged. They’re doing it on top of their day jobs. What I find a lot of marketers don’t necessarily take into account is when they give a brief that the agency has weeks to respond to, that agency is working from a base of zero.

When the client doesn’t have a Q&A session or a tissue session to guide the agency to make it more real life, they are working in a vacuum. That takes a lot of energy out of an agency, trying to get up to speed much quicker than they normally would, while trying to provide a silver bullet answer to a brief that is really difficult to grip.

Communication Breakdowns: The “Needy” Agency Myth

Darren:

There will be people listening saying, “Why didn’t the agency ask for more information or why don’t they just query the client more?” I recently interviewed a few senior marketers who ran their own pitch, and the first challenge they mentioned was, “My God, the amount of time and how needy the agencies are. They’re constantly coming back to you asking questions.” One actually said, “I just wish they’d take the brief, go away, solve it, and come back,” because of that demand on the marketer’s time.

Ellie:

Look, I think marketers need to take a leadership stake in their own pitch. I’m forever saying to clients that we want to run a positive pitch, not a negative pitch. A positive pitch is where you have two agencies left who are so good you find it hard to choose between them. A negative pitch is where you’re choosing the “least worst” agency based on the response they’ve given.

Marketers often fail to grasp that they enable that negative outcome via their own leadership. Agencies haven’t been furnished with enough information to deliver their best, or the briefing is bad. Asking questions of a brief should be a normal part of any process because, at the end of the day, both parties need to be set up for success and that dialogue is critical.

I’ve found that where there’s not a process in place, agencies are forced to call the client, ask questions on the fly, and have separate meetings. That’s where the client perceives they become needy. The obvious answer is to have a defined process, like an hour-long opportunity for the agency to ask all the questions they want and for that to be understood as a point where the client provides answers.

In one particular case I observed, there was no formal question process. The agency rang up one person, the main contact, for answers. They took those answers, got into the room with the rest of the client team, and were completely run over in the presentation because all the other clients had different opinions to the person they asked. They were scored down because the person who answered their questions didn’t have the same view as anyone else in the room.

Flawed Q&A Processes and Procurement Overkill

Darren:

I’m immediately thinking of the flip side—the procurement process where they ask for written questions and share all answers with everyone. They say it’s fairer, but it’s hard to get nuance from written questions, and you don’t want to reveal a unique benefit to competitors.

Ellie:

At the end of the day, you want to see the diversity of agency talent. Agencies should be rewarded for initiative or asking specific questions because that helps differentiate their solution. One pitch I observed had an all-agency Q&A session on a call. It was like tumbleweeds. No one wanted to ask any questions of real value; it was really surface level and a waste of time.

Regarding procurement and written questions: in one pitch, I saw a record of 148 written questions in an Excel template. It was hugely wide-ranging, repetitive, and quite derivative—like a laundry list. With six agencies in the process, of course things need to be in writing, but it was massive overkill in context of the detail we were being asked to go into.

Darren:

I once witnessed an open tender Q&A where the organisers said, “Clearly the RFP was well written because no one had any questions,” while all the agencies were sitting on their hands.

Ellie:

I can understand the motivation to save time and the concept of fairness. But you end up with the pitch version of an all-you-can-eat Las Vegas buffet. You just pile it all on, and it turns into this homogenous mass. You don’t get any kind of flex or diversity in the answers. That’s not in anyone’s best interest.

IP Theft and Unpaid Strategic Work

Darren:

In most cases, were the pitches still requiring the agencies to do largely unpaid work? 

Ellie:

Yeah, it was unpaid work. Stress testing is important, obviously, but personally, I think that should be based on a sample of what the agency can do. Where I saw the worst practice was a brief that literally asked for the entire answer. “We’ve got a strategy for next year, we have these campaigns, we want you to provide answers to all of the campaigns across the entirety of the year, strategy and everything else”.

The agency responded to that brief. Then, when it came time to negotiate on fee, the client tried to negotiate strategy out of the fee because the agency had already provided it in the pitch. It’s just not professionally ethical. I was in the background going, “Don’t do this”.

Darren:

What message does that send? What was the feeling inside the agency? 

Ellie:

The sentiment was a kind of weary resignation. They felt they had to negotiate on that basis; they couldn’t afford not to win the pitch. So they took the line of least resistance and accepted the bad practice. This contributes to the transactional master-servant dynamic that bleeds into day-to-day relationships, which at its worst is completely counterproductive.

Darren:

Marketers often talk about wanting an agency that will challenge them creatively. And then, unfortunately, through unintended consequences, they immediately demotivate the agency to do anything other than what they’re told.

Ellie:

When we run a pitch, we advise clients on the demarcation between a brief that allows latitude versus a completely directive brief. Often, a client will ask for a challenge but give a brief that says, “We want it exactly this way, these channels, this timing, this budget split.” You’re giving the agency no latitude to apply their own smarts. You get back three agencies who have all produced the same answer because they’re working in very narrow parameters.

Darren:

I remember years ago pitching for a retailer. They wanted a brand positioning plus their entire sales programme for the year. We did all the work, won the pitch, and almost none of that work saw the light of day because the information changed. It felt like a huge amount of work for very little result apart from winning the business.

Ellie:

It’s all about the balance. You need to see enough of a sample of the agency to understand that they’re capable. But overkill just leads to dead wood. It’s never really going to see the light of day, so what value does that add in a pitch process? None at all.

The Silent Treatment: Delays and Ghosting

Darren:

A thing that comes out of the State of the Pitch is timeliness. Often agencies feel like they’re left dangling. Is that something you observed? 

Ellie:

It happened more towards the end. In pitches without a process, it was worse because they clearly didn’t have a defined timeline to make decisions. I witnessed one process where there were weeks of zero feedback. The agency was calling, but there was no decision.

Agencies put a lot of effort into the work and getting a team ready. Being left in limbo like that is really disheartening. Every agency I’ve spoken to would much rather be told “No” with clear feedback than be left hanging by a client who lacks the bravery to say no or simply can’t make the decision. If the process is elongated, just let the agency know. It’s basic professional courtesy.

Darren:

When agencies are left in that vacuum, their minds immediately go to catastrophe: “We haven’t got it,” or “What did we do wrong?” They immediately turn it on themselves.

Ellie:

It’s learned behaviour. The perceived wisdom is, “As soon as they go quiet, you’ve lost the pitch.” It makes you feel insignificant and lacking in importance. When you’ve put all this work in and don’t even get the respect of a phone call, it takes an emotional toll. Clients say they want partnerships, but for that to happen, agencies have to be treated like partners.

False Praise and Indecision

Darren:

What were the debriefs like? And how many times were agencies told they came a close second? 

Ellie:

I didn’t really see any clear debriefs. But in every pitch room they went into, they got told at the end of the meeting how amazing they were: “You were so good, we really want to work with you.” And then either the goalposts would move, cost would come into play, or it would just go quiet.

Of the five or six I saw, two were definitively won. The remainder just had no conclusion after weeks. It was constant uncertainty.

Darren:

That would be so draining emotionally.

Ellie:

If you’re the lead of the agency, responsible for staff and money, it is incredibly draining. It could be so much easier and more equitable with simple process mechanisms and some courtesy.

Darren:

I know Adam Ferrier always says, “I’d rather come first or last in a pitch, as long as I know why.” 

Ellie:

I counsel agencies on that. You want to be memorable—either you completely nailed it and came first, or you were true to yourself but it wasn’t a good fit, so you came last. Last isn’t necessarily about mucking up; it’s about staying true to who you are. But the agency needs feedback on that.

Darren:

Let’s go to the other extreme. What was the worst behaviour that caused the worst reaction? 

Ellie:

There was one where the agency put a huge amount of work into the process, only to be told that the decision was going to be deferred for another 12 months. And they asked, “Can you hang on?” That was probably the most damning example. Before you go into a tender process, there should be surety that you are actually able to appoint an agency.

The Verdict: Don’t Ditch the Pitch, Fix the Process

Darren:

After this experience, are the stories legitimate? 

Ellie:

Generally, the frustration is real. However, I’m not a believer in “ditch the pitch.” Pitches have a vital role to play in setting teams up for success. But the process has to be sustainable, the outcome commercially equitable, and there must be professional courtesies.

A fair and reasonable process is the most important thing. When agencies are left in limbo or not given proper feedback, the negative sentiment grows. Agency leads tell me that pitching, when done properly, can be incredibly motivating for teams. But that can be ruined when processes are untenable. I don’t think it’s hard to fix. It’s a cultural thing—learned behaviour about how agencies should be treated. It just needs a behavioural reset.

Darren:

It’s interesting that a lot of marketers don’t perceive that they need pitch coaching until they’re in the middle of a pitch and wondering what to do next.

Ellie:

Marketers are under more pressure than ever before, which exacerbates some behaviours. I’ve observed more reticence to take coaching on board, perhaps due to fear of asking for help. But when they do, there are definitely positive outcomes. Having a third party who can call stuff out with radical candour can really help correct a pitch process.

Mismatched Expectations: Right-Sizing the Pitch

Ellie:

One other thing I’m conscious of is when marketers who worked at huge corporations move to a much smaller organisation. They then impose the same huge pitch processes they used at the conglomerate on smaller agencies.

I went to a conference of small agency owners in Melbourne. They were complaining: “They are asking us for $300,000 worth of work for a $30,000 project,” because that’s the only way the client knows how to pitch. They’ve imposed that model, and it’s one of the biggest things affecting smaller agencies.

I stood up and said, “I want to congratulate every single one of you who said no.” There were people refusing pitches because they weren’t viable. The more you tolerate that behaviour, the more it gets perpetuated. I am hugely in favour of agencies saying no to pitches where they are unreasonable. It’s one of the only ways behaviour can be improved.

Darren:

Ellie, if there’s an agency out there coming up to a pitch, can you be encouraged to put on the fedora and trench coat and go back undercover? 

Ellie:

Why not? If any agency wants to approach me, I’d be interested. That’s what I’m wearing right now; I just need my sunglasses and I’m good to go.

Darren:

Well, Ellie Angell, thank you so much. I’m sorry I’ve uncovered you as the undercover pitch consultant, but I’ve always practised complete transparency.

Ellie:

I love the attention, you know that. Thanks, Darren.

The post Managing Marketing: Insights From Agency Pitches Gone Wrong: From The Undercover Consultant appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The point being, keeping things focussed and to-the-point takes planning and thought. Once that is in place, we can move quickly, effectively, with pace and with purpose.

The importance of a focussed pitch process

Moving faster doesn’t mean cutting corners – it needs a sharp focus on discipline and rigour, attention to risks and a well-structured decision-making process. In other words, all the things you expect when selecting an agency partner.

Without this focus, a pitch process can simply drag on, becoming ever less involving for all concerned and running the risk of reaching no clear conclusion. Agencies begin to wonder whether the effort is worthwhile, quality of work suffers and decision making by the marketing and procurement team is delayed and deferred. This is unnecessarily time consuming, as well as being unrewarding and unsatisfactory for everybody concerned.

Far better to act with a clear and agreed focus – investing time in a plan which is clearly understood by client team and agencies alike, outcomes and a process that maintain momentum and a clear and an agreed outcome that everyone understands and signs up to.

Plan with focus. Then focus on the plan.

So, the big question to answer is – how does a team achieve this focus? Let’s define five universal focus points and how to plan them.

1 – Define the outcome. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But it’s surprising how often a pitch is set in motion with no agreed objective, just a vague feeling that things need to improve and a pitch is the way to do it. So, focus point number one is to define the objective. Not just “Recruit a new agency”, but a statement of what success will look like, a definition of the problem that is being addressed (how did we get to the decision to pitch?) and agreed objectives at the end of the planned pitch. This will define everything that happens during the pitch process that will follow.

2 – Appoint the team. Focus Point number two is to decide who needs to be involved and make sure they stay involved throughout the pitch. Who is the project owner? Who signs off the result and the budget? Who has the key interest in the result? Who will need to work with the appointed agency? Get those people signed up, and make sure no unnecessary team members are involved to voice an unnecessary opinion.

3 – Agree the scope of the pitch. It’s so easy for the scope of any project to grow into unplanned directions as it proceeds. Avoid this with Focus Point number 3 – define the scope and maintain razor-sharp attention to make sure no-one strays from it without a clear understanding of the ramifications of doing so. Extra management time, a longer process, distraction form the agreed objectives are the perils to be avoided.

4 – Maintain focus throughout. The timing plan is all-important for Focus Point Number 4. This is the framework that the team will work within, so it is best kept as tight as possible with good pace to keep the team engaged. Define the milestones and mark the occasion each time one is achieved. Review progress regularly. Keep resources channelled and tightly managed. Make sure key team members are not sidetracked and removed from the decision process.

5 – Ensure good leadership. A motivated, committed and properly empowered leader is the essential Focus Point Number 5 that will keep all this on the road. Authority in this role will make sure there is clear commentary from team members at all decision stages, distractions are avoided, mission creep does not take place, milestones are marked and decisions clearly reported. And, the ability to say “No” to distractions and non-essential changes to the plan are vital here. 

The pitfalls of an unfocussed pitch process

TrinityP3 has seen the results of a lack of focus at first hand, and we occasionally are called in to rescue failing processes. We’ve seen it all.

• Pitches with no clear end date.
• Pitches where the objective is not agreed or understood by all parties.
• Pitches where the procurement team drives the process without a proper brief from the marketing team.
• Pitches where marketing has run the project and involved the procurement team late in the process, resulting in long delays while everything is re-examined and renegotiated
• Pitches where huge amounts of inappropriate information are demanded from the agencies too early in the process.
• Pitch processes with stages that are only there because “That’s how we’ve always done it’, which nobody felt empowered to question.
• Pitches where agencies are asked to pitch for an poorly defined – or even undefined – result. For example; nothing upsets an agency management team like a six month full-on pitch which turns out to only entitle them to a place on a pitch roster for future project. This might be OK, but only of that is what the agencies understand from the outset and the process is designed and focussed on recruiting the best agencies for that specific job.

Mission creep, scope changes, lack of focussed leadership, unenforced timing plans, undefined sign off processes – they all happen and all too often.

We prefer to be involved from the beginning to help design an appropriate process that is focussed on the required outcomes from the outset.

BetterPitch to keep the focus

TrinityP3 has applied the experience of many hundreds of pitches to the development and design of BetterPitch. This process provides a guarantee that focus will be maintained at every stage, beginning with the agreed objectives.

We make sure that the appropriate time is invested up front to be certain that the process stays focussed – with clear, agreed objectives and outcomes to channel efforts and clear outcomes designed to ensure the desired success criteria are achieved. And we work to maintain focus throughout, for marketing, procurement and agency teams alike.

That way, the pitch equivalent of that famous unnecessarily long letter that Blaise apologised for all those years ago can be avoided.

Focus is one of our five guiding principles for BetterPitch, along with Fit, Focused and Fair. All are closely inter-related. Our promise is to bring them to every pitch we run, to achieve a better result for everyone involved. You can read more about the BetterPitch process here or contact us for a confidential discussion about how to pitch better.

The post Focus your pitch for a better pitch result appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The marketing procurement function is at a pivotal crossroads. For years, the mantra of “cost savings” has driven every decision, turning procurement managers into tactical executioners obsessed with the lowest hourly rate. But if your team is struggling with endless rework, strained agency relationships, and campaigns that fail to deliver, you are likely trapped in a costly illusion: the False Economy.

The truth is, traditional cost-cutting in marketing is often the single most significant driver of systemic waste. Squeezing agency fees forces them to cut corners—less experienced staff, less strategic thinking, and compromised production quality. The initial 5% saved is instantly overshadowed by the 20% wasted on internal time spent correcting a poorly executed brief or a campaign that simply fails to move the needle.

It is time for a radical reset.

This article provides a compelling rationale for adopting a new, future-proof strategic mandate: Waste Elimination and Value Architecture. This transformative approach, fully aligned with the advisory principles of TrinityP3, outlines how procurement can step beyond the spreadsheet and become the indispensable strategic partner that marketers desperately need.

The detailed, 5,000-word guide, “The Value Architect: Marketing Procurement’s New Mandate,” offers the definitive blueprint for this transformation. Below, we reveal the core challenges and the actionable solutions waiting inside.

The Crisis of the False Economy: The Four Pillars of Waste

Before you can build value, you must ruthlessly eliminate waste. Our research identifies four categories where budget, time, and effort drain away—often due to poor procurement strategy:

1. Strategic and Creative Waste (The Briefing Failure)

The costliest waste happens before a single line of code or creative is produced. It is the waste of ambiguity. Procurement’s historical detachment from the early briefing stage has led to vague objectives, shifting scopes, and a lack of measurable outcomes. This forces the agency to guess, leading to the spiral of rework that consumes countless hours of internal marketing time.

The Fix: Procurement must embed rigour into the front end of the marketing process. The guide details how to mandate standardised, data-backed briefing protocols, ensuring the agency’s Purpose aligns with a quantifiable business outcome from Day One.

2. Operational and Production Waste (The Workflow Drag)

Modern marketing requires speed, but internal workflows are often clogged with manual handoffs, unclear approval structures, and duplicative efforts across markets. A major contributor here is the Unoptimized Internal Studio. Many organisations set up in-house teams for “speed and control,” but without procurement oversight, these studios often lack commercial rigour, suffer from poor utilisation, and deliver low productivity. They become a hidden cost centre disguised as a savings.

The Fix: You need to apply commercial performance metrics to your internal teams. Our guide shows you how to conduct a Production Consultancy audit, treating your in-house studio like a third-party vendor subject to KPIs for utilisation, speed-to-market, and efficiency, thereby eliminating operational drag across the entire supply chain (internal and external).

3. Commercial and Remuneration Waste (The Fee Flaw)

The classic commercial failure is the vague Scope of Work (SOW). If your SOW is merely a “laundry list of campaigns,” the agency is forced to “over-quote” to cover the inevitable risk and scope creep. Similarly, using outdated fee models (like the rigid FTE-based retainer) for project-based work leads to perpetual resource misalignment and overpayment.

The Fix: The solution lies in architecting new fee models that incentivise performance, not just presence. The guide provides the framework for shifting to performance-based contracts and using TrinityP3’s benchmarking data to define tight, quantifiable SOWs that pay the agency for value delivered, not hours consumed.

4. Media and Channel Waste (The Effectiveness Gap)

The digital landscape is rife with waste: ad fraud, low viewability, and channel redundancy driven by the desire to be “everywhere.” Furthermore, in a world focused on ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance), the hidden Environmental Cost (Carbon Footprint) of excessive programmatic bidding is becoming a non-negotiable risk.

The Fix: Procurement must enforce media contracts with non-negotiable transparency clauses, third-party verification, and—critically—incorporate the carbon cost of communication as a measurable factor in media planning. This aligns procurement with corporate sustainability goals, mitigating both financial and reputational waste.

The AI Tsunami: Mitigating the New Catastrophic Risks

The arrival of Generative AI is amplifying marketing productivity but simultaneously introducing catastrophic new risks that can wipe out years of savings in a single lawsuit or brand crisis.

Procurement must urgently assume the mantle of Chief Risk Mitigator in the AI space. The guide provides the contractual blueprint necessary to manage this exposure:

• IP and Copyright Liability: If an AI-generated campaign asset is found to have infringed on a licensed work, the campaign is dead, and the legal costs are immense. Mitigation: The guide mandates Robust Contractual Indemnities from all vendors, guaranteeing the legal defensibility of AI outputs and enforcing the vetting of AI providers based on data provenance.
• Ethical and Bias Exposure: AI models can perpetuate bias, leading to discriminatory targeting or creative that is culturally insensitive. Mitigation: Procurement must demand documentation of AI Governance Models, ensuring that audits for bias and compliance are explicitly part of the contract.

The challenge of AI is not merely technical; it is commercial and legal. Procurement is the only function positioned to build the contractual firewalls necessary to protect the organisation from this new generation of waste.

The Blueprint for Transformation: Introducing the SMAP

Moving to this strategic mandate requires a formal, phased approach. Inside “The Value Architect,” you will find the complete Strategic Marketing Procurement Plan (SMAP)—a multi-year roadmap designed to operationalise change and govern value creation.

The SMAP is structured around the TrinityP3 P3 Framework: Purpose, People, and Process and involves three critical phases:

1. Phase 1: Assess and Diagnose: Quantify the TCO (including the actual cost of your in-house agency). Establish the baseline for waste and risk exposure.
2. Phase 2: Optimise and Structure: This is where you implement the Make vs. Buy decision, roll out performance-based contracts, and establish the Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) with marketing leadership.
3. Phase 3: Govern and Measure (Ongoing): Enforce accountability through Quarterly Performance Scorecards and annual contract compliance reports, ensuring adherence to AI governance and waste-reduction KPIs (like Rework Reduction Rate).

By executing the SMAP, procurement stops being a tactical cost centre and becomes a Future-Proofing Partner. This engine ensures every dollar invested in marketing communications is an effective, high-performing dollar.

The stakes are too high to continue managing marketing spend based on outdated cost-cutting metrics. Download the complete guide, “The Value Architect: Marketing Procurement’s New Mandate,” today and gain the definitive strategic framework to eliminate waste, mitigate AI risk, and drive superior marketing performance for your organisation.

Click here to read and download the complete 5,000-word Strategic Guide.

The post The End of the Cost-Cutting Era: Why Your Savings Mandate is Creating Massive Marketing Waste appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

We explore the definition of agentic AI, its applications in real-world marketing scenarios, and the benefits it brings to efficiency and decision-making. The conversation also delves into the importance of building consumer trust in AI, the evolving landscape of branding, and the role of creativity in the age of AI. Additionally, they discuss how organizations can attract and retain talent in this new environment and provide methodologies for implementing AI effectively in marketing strategies.

If last year was the year when Generative AI took centre stage with some high-profile brand film productions, then this year is looking to be the year of the agents. Agentic AI is not just the hot topic; it is driving brand transformations as the new operating system for brands, for creativity, for growth and for talent attraction and retention.

You can listen to the podcast here:

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Agentic AI. If I hear it one more time, it’s definitely top of place on my bullshit bingo card,

Transcription (Edited):

Darren Woolley

Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the word from our guests each week.

If last year was the year of generative AI, which took centre stage with some high-profile brand film productions , then this year is looking to be the year of the agents. Agentic AI isn’t just a hot topic; it’s driving brand transformations as the new operating system for brands, creativity, growth, and talent attraction and retention.

So, what do brands need to do to discover their AI advantage and scale without limits? To answer that question in a language we can all understand, please welcome to the Managing Marketing podcast, Angela Tangas, the new Global Oliver CEO and Brand Tech Group’s Chief Strategy Officer. Welcome, Angela.

Angela Tangas

Hello, Darren. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Darren Woolley

Great to have you here. And Jack Smyth, Brandtech and Jellyfish’s Country Lead in Australia. Hello, Jack.

Jack Smyth

Hello, Darren. Thank you so much for letting us join.

Defining Agentic AI: Software that Uses Software

Darren Woolley

Well, it is the hot topic, isn’t it? As I said, generative AI seemed to dominate the advertising industry last year. But this year, it’s definitely agentic AI. If I hear it one more time, it’s top of the list on my bullshit bingo card, because everyone seems to be talking about it.

We need to make sure that the average person working in advertising and marketing gets a proper understanding of what we’re actually talking about. Jack, can you, in 30 words or less, define agentic AI?

Jack Smyth

Absolutely. My favourite definition is that it’s software that can use software. Think about delegating tasks to technology that can perform them on your behalf. A simple example is a web browser. You and I have spent hours clicking around trying to navigate websites. What if that browser could click around for you, allowing you to use your time more valuably?

Darren Woolley

And hopefully then summarise everything it’s looked at.

Jack Smyth

And come up with a better definition of agents. That would be the best customer experience.

Darren Woolley

Yeah. Angela, when you’re speaking to CMOs or other marketing leaders, how do you frame agentic AI?

Agentic AI as a ‘Super Coach’ for Marketers

Angela Tangas

Well, there are a few threads to this, Darren. I’ve been with the company for four months and have spoken with CMOs across different markets. They are all clearly grappling with how to best leverage AI—not just agentic AI, but AI more broadly—across their entire marketing ecosystem.

The immediate question becomes: where and how can I get the most value from this idea of “software using software”?

We’re seeing big opportunities right from the very beginning, starting with the briefing process—for example, when providing a creative brief to a company like ours. It extends all the way through to determining the next best action based on the outcome a media channel is demonstrating. The agents organise all this and provide it in real-time.

I like to think of agentic AI almost like your super coach. If you’re the CMO, a brand lead, or a data scientist, your super coach helps you translate what’s happening across your world. It interprets data in interesting ways, allowing you to make the most informed next action.

That action could involve:

• Modifying your brand campaign.
• Rethinking your product strategy.
• Taking consumer insights and feeding them directly into the sales or service teams.

The interoperability of agentic AI is particularly fascinating because it services how we can all be better at what we do every day.

Brand Case Studies: Optimising and Researching

Darren Woolley

Most of the conversations I’ve had are with media agencies, and several have trained staff to build their own AI agents. I understand why: I once spoke to a junior media agency person whose day job was watching three screens pump out numbers, which they then manually retyped into an Excel spreadsheet. There clearly had to be a better way.

But beyond agencies, what about the brands themselves? Have you seen good examples of brands embracing agentic AI to improve their work and results?

Jack Smyth

Absolutely. Two examples come to mind.

Example 1: Proactive Marketing Strategy

One recent example involved an airline based in Asia. We created an agent for them that would read their press releases and proactively suggest a marketing strategy to convert that activity into bookings for the new route.

From the client’s perspective, this fundamentally changes the way they work. Instead of writing briefs, they get into the mindset of approving recommendations from an agent. This is liberating. If someone in the business is working on a new product, the agent can start the marketing process based on the initial PR release, and the client simply jumps in when it’s ready.

Example 2: Competitor Analysis

The second example is for a client who created an agent to keep an eye on their competitors. An agent is a truly semi-autonomous worker that operates 24/7. It doesn’t get bored; it checks every possible angle and finds every aspect of the story. This allows the client to learn an enormous amount about competitor actions—something that would have taken a human hours of painstaking analysis. This analysis helps the client think strategically about how to grow market share by behaving differently.

Darren Woolley

I like that one example is about optimising opportunity—it’s not mere automation, but contains analysis. The other highlights the research function of agentic AI, which makes recommendations and learns from your actions.

Benefits and Addressing Ethical Concerns

Darren Woolley

What are the direct benefits that marketers are reporting from implementing this? There’s genuine concern in some organisations about embracing AI due to legal and ethical reasons surrounding copyright, data safety, and privacy.

Angela Tangas

We are certainly seeing efficiency gains without question. These gains occur when you have the right partner to help you identify how to best utilise agents and where to extract the most value. You must identify the most time-intensive tasks that can be leveraged by automation. This frees up capacity to focus on higher-order problem-solving efforts that drive strategic value for the business.

Regarding compliance, privacy, and ethical concerns , that’s precisely why you would choose a partner like Brandtech Group. All the infrastructure we build belongs to you, and all the value and IP accrue directly to you. This is critical because brands need as much control as possible over their ecosystem.

We always knew brand equity was important. Now, if anything, brand becomes the last mile of competitive advantage or the most important asset for an organisation. While organisations are testing and experimenting, creating a temporary time drain , the flip side is that those who embrace it effectively gain efficiency and make decisions faster and more effectively.

The Role of Brand in an AI-Driven World

Darren Woolley

Jack, consumers are using AI, too, and a lot of what they input refines the AI’s responsiveness. How does a business ensure what they put into AI doesn’t become part of a large knowledge pool shared with competitors?

Jack Smyth

That’s a fascinating question. As Angela noted, brand is the last mile or the moat you have. Every asset you publish effectively becomes a brief to someone else’s model about why they should choose your brand.

It’s less about separating ourselves from the training set—or the consideration set—and more about how you articulate your brand to make it the obvious choice. The customer’s agent is fundamentally trying to find the best deal, product, or price.

This creates an entirely new field of branding around that fuzzy logic. Today, many agents are rational; they look for the best price, fastest delivery, or highest reviews. In a world where agents can easily find that information, you have to articulate why your brand is better. That’s fascinating because the agent acts as a member of your audience, and they think and care about different things.

Building Consumer Trust

Darren Woolley

A report suggested there’s a big trust gap with many consumers regarding AI. How do businesses make consumers feel better about interacting with their AI agent?

Angela Tangas

Trust sits at the heart of any great brand. Many organisations are becoming much more open about what content is AI-powered versus what isn’t. That openness is necessary and helpful.

We are also making sure that content we generate includes the correct watermarks. This provides the brand with absolute certainty regarding where and how that content is being used in the broader environment. This is crucial for IP and preserving brand value. However, we still have a way to go in solving the consumer trust equation.

Darren Woolley

I like the watermark idea, though the first thing I found was an AI that could remove watermarks. Perhaps burying it in the metadata is better, as AI doesn’t seem to touch that.

Angela Tangas

Indeed, these are interesting observations. It’s not necessarily visible; it’s all in the meta tagging.

Darren Woolley

Jack, you made the point that this changes how we think about brands. If the goal is not just to protect IP, but to create content that influences all AI LLMs—so that consumers searching for my product find my brand first —that’s very different from our current attitude, which is obsessed with ownership and trademarks.

Jack Smyth

Absolutely. I think it’s a really exciting evolution of how you define a brand because it is somewhat more democratised. A brand is now defined for different audiences: human and AI.

When marketers recognise it’s not a zero-sum game, they gain a different perspective. We talk about tracking your share of voice, your share of market, and your share of model. Growing your share of model is key because it will become a leading indicator for your share of market as trust in AI recommendations grows.

We saw this with a CPG client using agents for a pre-flight test. The agent learned from the assets, which included beautiful food photography with chopped chives. Consistently, the model reported it wasn’t a good fit for a working parent, reasoning that no one has time to chop chives after work. There’s a pleasing humanity to the way these agents think because they fundamentally try to help you.

Darren Woolley

The AI is learning more based on feedback. This moves toward fuzzy logic, where they start to understand emotions. One great lesson from behavioural economics is that we are predictably irrational, which will always be a challenge for software.

Angela Tangas

That’s why you need the people. You can have brilliant agents running the workflow, but humans must take the insights and intelligence produced by the agents and use them to create new pathways to value. This means new ways to connect with consumers and build a brand world where customers want to live the brand.

Brand equity is still valuable. The orchestration of the workflow is all about the humans. Humans elevate the way we leverage the agentic workflow to drive new value for the critical customer connection.

Marketing’s Operational and Cultural Shift

Darren Woolley

If embracing agentic AI requires collaboration across business functions , how does it fundamentally change the marketing function’s focus on driving growth?

Angela Tangas

Exactly. The Oliver side of Brandtech helps marketers design, build, run, and optimise operating models. By partnering with customers on the inside, we get brilliant access to their marketing organisation and how it interfaces with sales, product, compliance, and PR teams.

With a more AI workflow, we advise clients on:

1. The evolving shapes and types of talent they need now versus next.
2. The necessary skills that result.

Marketers are increasingly looking to return to the craft of marketing. This means focusing on driving market share and creating wonderful customer experiences. They want to step back from tasks like media planning or buying and concentrate on ensuring the brand connects with the customer at every moment. That’s the exciting opportunity: evolving their marketing ecosystem to focus more on the top and bottom line.

Evolution or Revolution?

Darren Woolley

Is this an evolution or a revolution? Digital marketing evolved over 20 good years. But AI is only three years in and making massive changes. Should we be thinking revolution?

Angela Tangas

This is the trillion-pound question, as it impacts global GDP. Every existing company still has a business to run. Meanwhile, new, disruptive organisations are emerging, built 100% on AI foundations. This creates competitiveness challenges between traditional and nimble organisations.

I see this as helping organisations think in a two-speed manner. You can’t change your operations while trying to achieve growth simultaneously. You must be smarter about partnering and directing the right resources toward what’s next.

AI use cases change almost daily. The quality of GenAI TVC content produced in record time means you don’t necessarily need a traditional advertiser for fantastic TV production anymore. You could create your own TVC.

This brings us back to the operating model. It must be built with discipline. Discipline is vital because you know technology will keep evolving.

We don’t have the luxury of big transformation budgets like we did before. Many previous investments, like in CRM during COVID, led to “tech debt”. We shouldn’t repeat that mistake.

This all circles back to data. How many organisations have the data maturity needed to make the most of AI today, let alone tomorrow? That’s why the operating model needs disciplined construction.

Democratising Creativity

Darren Woolley

For 50 years, the creative department was the neat source of all creativity in advertising. Agencies still use that term. Yet, AI is becoming a fantastic creative provocateur, a workplace for exploring ideas in real-time. What is your view on AI’s ability to finally liberate or democratise creativity? (I’ve always found the idea of a ‘creative department’ a bit of an anathema, as all humans are creative.)

Jack Smyth

Starting with the premise that every human is creative and we shouldn’t ring-fence it is wonderful. Agents are incredibly empowering. It has never been easier to go from zero to one.

I use an agent for initial research to build confidence in a direction. I might then use another to generate more than mocks; I can build an entire app during a meeting to show the client the customer experience. This is a great leveler: if you have the idea, you can now start to build it.

The truly revolutionary aspect is the agent that helps you stand out. We call them zigzags. These agents are designed to provoke and even aggravate ideas. They challenge ideas by saying, “Someone else has done that,” or “This is where everyone else was ending up”. Having an infinite group holding you to account—like a creative person surrounded by agents that not only make them more effective but also ask, “Is this the best you could do?”—is an interesting dynamic that creative people respond well to. The agent is an instigator and collaborator, not just automation.

Darren Woolley

A zigzag would be anathema to the creatives who used to look through the Cannes book for inspiration. They were happy to be inspired by category norms. People often think AI replaces creativity , but it works much better as that provocateur or stimulant to push people outside their normal boundaries.

Angela Tangas

Exactly. There’s industry discussion about the “market of lemons” due to the rapid creation of content, and the view on all this “AI slop”. The important thing is brand differentiation. Creativity is always needed to enhance the brand, and the power of storytelling takes on a new meaning to connect with customers. The creative process is arguably becoming even more valuable now.

Darren Woolley

And using an AI agent to refine or test that creativity is vital.

Attracting and Retaining Talent

Darren Woolley

What role will AI agents have in attracting and retaining good talent? We hear stories that AI will make us so efficient we’ll need fewer staff. But it’s becoming more of a talent game where attracting the best people is key.

Angela Tangas

The shape and characteristics of the talent base are shifting. We’re seeing demand for more strategists, creatives, and data scientists. A new archetype is emerging: the agent architect. This person looks at all the ways to leverage agents for better, faster outcomes.

What AI is surfacing is the importance of EQ and critical thinking. Problem-solving is the core game. Curiosity is what will differentiate you in being a fantastic user of agentic AI. The ability to demonstrate new value to the company is why EQ and critical thinking become a superpower.

A Methodology for Transformation

Darren Woolley

What should marketers be thinking about now? Many feel pressure to change but lack a clear vision or process. How can they avoid investing heavily and ending up with tech debt? Do you have a methodology for this evolution?

Jack Smyth

One helpful process is to map out the existing customer journey and identify where agents will have the greatest influence. This helps prioritise where to focus:

• Does it help people understand why they need our brand?
• Does it help people have a better buying experience?

Agents will play a role at every stage, but this creates a hierarchy for focus. Agents are a multiplier for great talent and allow you to find solutions across your entire roster.

Angela Tangas

The first question is: Is the market clear on where they need to win first? Clarity is key. Marketers need clarity on winnable spaces or defensive moves to maintain competitiveness.

Once clear on where to win, you work backward: what outcomes are needed? Then, you look at the workflow.

It’s common to see brands invest time in pilots without translating them into scaling solutions. This happens when they haven’t figured out where to unlock the most workflow value.

The commercial piece is fundamental, involving two parts:

1. Drive as much efficiency as possible in the marketing workload.
2. Reinvest that efficiency into driving market share, customer growth, or revenue.

It cannot be either/or; it must be sequential. Everyone must maintain and ideally grow the business for the future.

Darren Woolley

As you mentioned, Angela, this transformation spans all organisational aspects, not just marketing. Few marketing departments control all customer touch points. It’s an organisational opportunity. The danger for marketers is not proactively presenting a methodology for this overall transformation, leaving them as a secondary consideration. Marketing is central to the customer experience. The twin benefits are efficiency and enhancing the customer experience to make it “sticky”.

Angela Tangas

Marketing is the growth catalyst of the organisation. Part of its responsibility is driving new revenue shapes, which comes back to the customer experience, understanding the customer intimately, and brand importance.

Scaling Beyond Pilot Purgatory

Darren Woolley

How do you scale this for growth, moving from pilots to full organisational adoption?

Jack Smyth

A key part is aligning at the start how many teams will benefit. Second, be honest about how you evaluate the pilot. Being faster with AI isn’t enough; did it lead to a new consumer insight or more effective assets? Third, training is essential. Our business, Jellyfish, finds training to be our fastest-growing product. It empowers teams to embed the pilot experience into their daily work. By following those three phases, you avoid pilot purgatory—being surrounded by cool ideas that aren’t quite proven or embeddable.

Darren Woolley

I love that: pilot purgatory. What a terrible place to be. Angela and Jack, thank you for joining me today on Managing Marketing to discuss agentic AI. It is the hot topic of 2026. You presented it in the most accessible, interesting language possible.

Before we go, one final question: are there any downsides to all this? We hear doomsayers talk about the destruction of humanity coming from AI. Do you have one of those to share?

The post Managing Marketing: Unlocking the Power of Agentic AI for Brands appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

So, why the disconnect? Why is the thing marketers say they want most – transformative strategy – also the very thing being devalued in the procurement process?

As a consultant who sits in the middle of these agency-marketer selection processes, I believe the answer lies in the way we’ve allowed “data” to become a mask for a lack of genuine insight. We’ve turned the pitch process into a battle of the black boxes. We’ve let agencies hide behind “proprietary tools,” “AI-enabled sentiment engines,” and “deep-dive data stacks” that are designed more to obscure the agency’s thinking than to reveal it.

The result?

Marketers find it almost impossible to test an agency’s true strategic capability. They are essentially being asked to bet on which agency has the shiniest toy, rather than which agency has the best people.

The traditional pitch is an arms race of data acquisition. Agencies spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours trying to prove they have “secret” information about your brand that you don’t. They present slides filled with complex graphs and “unique methodologies” that look impressive but often boil down to the same old platitudes wrapped in new jargon.

This is what I call the “Black Box Problem.” When an agency uses its own proprietary tracker or a closed-loop AI tool to develop a strategy, you aren’t testing their thinking; you’re testing their access. You have no way of knowing if the “insight” they’ve found is a genuine strategic leap or just an automated output from a piece of software.

This obfuscation has devalued strategy because it has made it feel like a commodity. If the “tool” does the work, why pay for the “brain”? This is exactly what the WARC report warns – the risk that we are hiding behind mountains of research and losing our point of view.

The TrinityP3 Workshop offers a level playing field.

At TrinityP3, we’ve always advocated for the “Strategy Workshop” as the critical step in any agency selection. It’s Step 5 of our methodology for a reason: it is like a test drive, it moves the focus from “the promise” to “the proof.” But even a workshop can be gamed if we aren’t careful.

So, here is a provocative thought for every marketer looking to hire a strategic partner: Stop asking agencies to bring their own data. Imagine a pitch process where the strategic workshop is no longer a test of who has the biggest research budget. Instead, imagine if the client provided all three shortlisted agencies with access to the same live, continuous brand tracking platform – specifically, Tracksuit.

By giving every agency, the keys to the client’s actual category data, customer segments, and brand health metrics on Tracksuit, you do something radical. You eliminate the obfuscation. You take the “stove” out of the equation and focus entirely on the “chef.”

Time to test the brain, not the box.

When every agency is looking at the exact same dashboard, the “what” is no longer the variable. Everyone can see that consideration in the 18-24 demographic is dipping. Everyone can see that a competitor is gaining ground on “innovation” perceptions.

The real test, in fact the only test that matters, is what the agency does with that information.

In this structured workshop environment, the marketer gets to see the raw, unvarnished strategic capability of the team. You get to watch as they filter the Tracksuit data, cross-reference it with media consumption habits, and search for the “Why” behind the “What.”

• Agency A might look at the data and see a need for a massive reach campaign to fix awareness.
• Agency B might dive deeper into the imagery tab and realise the problem isn’t awareness, but a misalignment between brand values and actual customer perception.
• Agency C might find a hidden “white space” segment that the brand is accidentally appealing to and suggest a pivot that could unlock millions in new revenue.

Suddenly, you are not judging a deck. You are judging actionable strategic and creative thinking. You are assessing their ability to take a common source of truth and turn it into a strategy that actually drives business value.

Can this lead to revaluing the “Strategic Leap”?

The WARC report highlights a fear that AI will eventually learn to take the “strategic leaps” that have traditionally been the domain of humans. I disagree. AI can find the patterns, but it cannot find the meaning.

By using a platform like Tracksuit in a pitch workshop, you are forcing agencies to perform those human leaps in front of you. Tracksuit’s design is excellent precisely because it doesn’t try to be a black box; it’s an open window. It presents the data with such clarity and simplicity that it actually demands more from the strategist. You can’t hide behind a “jargon-filled PDF report” when the client is looking at the same intuitive dashboard you are.

This approach puts the strategist back in the spotlight. It revalues the discipline because it proves that two different teams can look at the same data and arrive at vastly different outcomes, one of which will be significantly more effective than the others. That difference is the “value” of strategy. That difference is what you are actually hiring.

A Call to Action for Marketer

The era of buying “proprietary insights” is over. In a world where data is democratised and AI is ubiquitous, the only remaining competitive advantage is the quality of your agency’s thinking.

If you are running a tender this year, I challenge you to change the rules. Don’t ask for a “strategic response” based on their research. Hand them the keys to your brand tracker. Give them the same level playing field. And then watch closely.

If an agency complains that they “need their own tools” to be effective, they are telling you they are a software reseller, not a strategic partner. The best agencies, the ones with the enquiring minds and the “marketing sherpas” described by WARC, will relish the challenge. They will love the fact that they don’t have to waste time gathering data and can spend every minute of the workshop proving why their brains are the best investment you’ll ever make.

Strategy isn’t devalued because it’s no longer needed. It’s devalued because we’ve stopped testing it properly. It’s time to bring it back into the light.

Interested in really understanding an agency’s strategic ability when you pitch or tender, then you can read more on our BetterPitch process here or contact us today to discuss how we can assist.

The post Why the agency pitch is often where strategy goes to die and how to fix it appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.

The arguments for running an in-house pitch are compelling. It allows for tighter control over the brief, quicker alignment with internal commercial objectives, and a direct, unmediated assessment of chemistry and cultural fit. When managed correctly, a DIY pitch can feel faster, more authentic, and perfectly aligned with the organisation’s values. But here’s the critical watch-out: believing that ‘DIY’ means ‘easy’ is the fastest route to a costly mismatch.

While a pitch consultant can bring valuable objectivity and process, marketers who choose the DIY route must acknowledge that they are effectively assuming the role of the pitch expert. This requires far more than simply setting up a few meetings. It demands structure, deep market knowledge, and ruthless internal honesty about resource constraints.

Watch-Out 1: Mistaking the Brief for the Strategy

The most common pitfall in a DIY pitch is treating the Invitation to Tender (ITT) or Request for Information (RFI) as a simple document request, rather than a strategic exercise.

Your pitch brief should not just detail the project scope; it must define the criteria for success and the commercial realities of the partnership.

• The Problem: Most DIY pitches start with a general description of the desired creative or media outcomes. They often fail to articulate the required resource model, the expected commercial terms (e.g., fee structure, payment terms), or the internal reporting cadence.
• The Solution: Before sending out a single email, your internal team must define two things: the non-negotiable KPIs (and how they will be measured), and the budget, clearly defining what is fixed cost versus performance incentive. Vague briefs yield vague, and ultimately disappointing, proposals.

Watch-Out 2: The Illusion of Market Knowledge

Marketers often fall back on the agencies they know, the ones their friends recommend, or the ones who are currently doing great work for a competitor. This leads to a shortlist built on comfort and confirmation bias, rather than genuine market-wide fit.

In a dynamic market like Australia, excellent specialist agencies, tech partners, and boutique shops are emerging daily. Relying on your personal network or a basic Google search means you are instantly filtering out the very partners who might offer a competitive advantage or unique capability.

• The Problem: Your shortlist risks being shallow and biased. You might miss a smaller agency perfectly positioned to deliver a niche brief because they lack the high-profile credentials or are simply not top-of-mind. This results in the wrong agency being selected, or worse, the same agency being chosen for the wrong reasons.
• The Solution: You need a systematic approach to market mapping. This requires access to a comprehensive, up-to-date, and unbiased database of the agency landscape—one that categorises agencies not just by size or location, but by specific capabilities, client history (confidentially noted), and unique commercial models. Tools that use AI to search and match natural language requests to deep data are essential for ensuring a comprehensive and equitable selection process.

Watch-Out 3: Underestimating the Time and Resource Drain

The pitch process is not just a marketing task; it is an administrative, legal, and emotional marathon that requires significant internal resources.

TrinityP3 research consistently shows that marketers running their own pitches frequently underestimate the time commitment by factors of two or three.

• The Problem: The pitch starts strong, but quickly loses momentum. Marketing Directors and CMOs, already operating at capacity, become overwhelmed by coordination, scheduling, NDA management, and the sheer volume of material review. This disruption not only affects the pitch quality but also distracts the internal team from their core business responsibilities. Pitches drag on, leading to agency fatigue and a damaged reputation in the market.
• The Solution: Resource the pitch internally as if it were a high-priority, dedicated project. Assign a lead project manager (who is not the primary decision-maker) and ensure they have a clear internal deadline and the necessary authority to demand timely input from procurement, finance, and legal teams. Furthermore, have a structured, transparent process for providing feedback and eliminating candidates quickly and respectfully.

The Path to a Successful DIY Pitch

The power of the DIY pitch lies in the control it grants the marketer. It is an opportunity to forge a relationship that is fundamentally aligned from Day One.

However, success is not achieved through convenience; it is achieved through diligence. By proactively structuring the brief, embracing comprehensive market mapping beyond the usual suspects, and realistically accounting for the massive internal resource commitment, marketers can confidently navigate the pitch process.

Own your search, but do it with the structure and rigor that a multi-million-dollar decision deserves. This balance of confidence and discipline is the true mark of a successful DIY pitch. And if you get stuck, we are always happy to help.

The post Own Your Agency Search: The Power of DIY, and the Pitfalls to Avoid appeared first on TrinityP3 Global Marketing Management Consultants.