APCON tasked on pitch fee
Practitioners under the aegis of the Media Independent Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MIPAN) have tasked the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) to come to the rescue of their agencies insisting that APCON should mandate multinationals and other brand owners to pay pitch fees.
They hold that pitch fee is a precarious situation in Integrated Marketing Communications industry at the moment, noting that most multinationals invite many agencies just to gather information from them.
The Business Unit Director, MediaReachOMD, Promise Oduh, noted that MIPAN agencies could not call to order multinationals that refused to pay pitch fees without the help of APCON. He stressed that APCON needed to take a stand on pitch fees because that would help discourage multinationals from inviting too many agencies to a pitch.
In his words: “If they know that they are going to pay those agencies, then of course they will streamline to about two or three agencies in the course of calling for a pitch.”
The MediaReachOMD boss, however, lamented that no agency had ever been paid pitch fee, stressing that it was very unprofessional because multinationals were taking agencies for granted by inviting too many agencies to pitches.
“I think the issue of pitch fee should be in the front burner and it needs to be addressed urgently,” he warned.
Also speaking, the Director, Buying & Control at MediaReachOMD Nigeria, Yinka Adebayo, noted that the problem of pitch fee was persistent in Nigeria because most agencies were living on survival mentality.
Mr. Adebayo pointed out that until agencies moved away from the conservational level to the level of adding value to their clients’ businesses, clients would not recognise them enough to pay them pitch fees.
He said: “Here you are, from January to December, you don’t have any new business as an agency and a client now calls to say ‘come and take’; you won’t even think about pitch fees.”
“So, I think we need to begin to instill a high sense of professionalism to what we do and how we do them. Even the clients will begin to appreciate it because for me we need to move to a situation where we shift the conversation away from price to value; because clients need to begin to see value.”
Meanwhile, the Executive Secretary, MIPAN, Eki Adzufeh, has this to say on pitch fees; “It is not different from any other rule. It is self-regulation. The truth of the matter is that there are some agencies that I know in MIPAN that if you don’t talk about pitch fee they will not come but there are some who are basically surviving.”
“Therefore, anything you flash at them goes. But such poor business decisions and choices are the bane of our industry.”
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