The Transfer Window

A couple of weeks ago Belgium's ad agency community went on virtual strike as a response to the ever increasing amount of speculative work going into client pitch processes. It got a lot of coverage and is pretty old news now. I was having a chat with the smart folk from 7th Chamber today about the spate of media accounts changing hands over the last few months and we jokingly referred to it as the transfer window. Which got me thinking about what they are trying to do in Belgium. Because if there was a transfer window in agency world, then no-one would have the human resources to go for every piece of business. Which would mean that everyone would prioritise what to pitch for, based on a set of criteria which would in most cases benefit the clients. So there would be less agencies pitching for each account and spending less money on wasteful pitch process, which would make agencies more profitable without any adverse effects on their clients. And clients would know that anyone that they were seeing had put an awful lot of thought into why they wanted to be in the room. And that whoever they appointed wouldn't spend the next 6 months looking at their watches because they had a pitch to get back to. There's no reason why this can't happen. So what shall we say? January?