Pitch Consultants Aren't Rigged Toward Price. Fairness Is.

"On most other factors, the network agencies have equalised the scores, so ability, expertise, creative quality and chemistry have started to even out," Naresh Gupta, co-founder of Bang in the Middle, told exchange4media this month. "Today, across all pitches, cost plays a very big role in who wins." That observation describes what is actually happening inside consultant-led agency pitches at brands including Tata Motors, Hero MotoCorp, TVS Motor, L'Oréal and Godrej Consumer, according to recent Indian trade coverage of the trend.

Firms like Ebiquity, A.T. Kearney, Deloitte and PwC are hired to bring structure and neutrality to a process that used to run on relationships and internal bias, not to find the cheapest agency. One CMO told exchange4media: "Consultants provide an external reference point and help validate whether agencies are offering competitive market rates. It also gives procurement greater confidence in the outcome." Ebiquity's own group CEO, Ruben Schreurs, confirmed to Digiday in July that media reviews are "absolutely" on the rise.

Former Omnicom Media India strategic advisor Shashi Sinha made the observation that explains the whole mechanism: consultants' "focus remains overwhelmingly on rates, pricing and benchmarking," he told exchange4media, adding he isn't convinced "strategy is their core strength." That is not a criticism of consultants doing their job badly, it is a description of what they are actually equipped to compare with rigor. Price and commercial terms can be benchmarked precisely, market to market. Chemistry, creative instinct and strategic judgement cannot be benchmarked with anything close to that precision, no matter how many scoring matrices get built to try.

A well-run, consultant-led pitch does two things at once, and only one of them is intentional. It removes the old sources of bias, the incumbent's comfortable relationship, the loudest personality in the room, and it also, as an unplanned side effect, compresses every genuinely subjective differentiator toward the middle of the scale, because subjective things score more consistently once everyone is measured against the same rubric by a neutral third party. Rediffusion chairman Sandeep Goyal's blunter framing: "Most consultants don't actually understand advertising. The junior members they send have impressive degrees but often little domain knowledge. They become traffic controllers rather than value creators." Whether or not that is fair to any individual consultant, it points at the same mechanism from a different angle. Gozoop's Abhishek Raut captured the practitioner's exasperation: "We used to pitch ideas. Now we pitch ideas, chemistry, AI, data security, category expertise, culture, commercials… and occasionally, the idea."

It is tempting to land the blame entirely on procurement, and there is real truth in that direction too, procurement teams hold more decision-making power in agency selection today than marketing teams do, according to multiple executives quoted in this coverage. But procurement is not overriding an otherwise-clear signal in favour of a worse partner. The signal genuinely is unclear on every axis except price, because the evaluation process worked exactly as designed on those other axes. Procurement is not distorting the outcome, it is the only function in the room whose preferred metric still produces a clean, defensible tiebreaker once everything else has converged.

That is a more uncomfortable finding than "procurement only cares about price," because it means the fix is not persuading procurement to value something else. The scorecard itself would need an intentional, weighted asymmetry that keeps a real, defensible gap open between agencies on non-price dimensions, rather than letting fairness quietly flatten those dimensions into a rounding error. Most evaluation frameworks do not do that today, they aim for comparability, and comparability, taken far enough, is indistinguishable from a tie. The downstream effects are already visible: Gupta notes average agency tenure has fallen to around two years, pitch cycles that used to take three months now regularly stretch past six, and tgthr co-founder Rahul Vengalil points out the high cost of running a consultant-led process confines this dynamic, for now, to large corporations, meaning the agencies most exposed to price-driven tiebreaks are often competing for the industry's most prestigious accounts.

For agencies, the lesson is not to compete harder on the criteria a scorecard already measures well, that is a race to the bottom by definition. It is to make the parts of an offer genuinely hard to commoditise impossible to force onto a like-for-like spreadsheet line, specific named-team commitments, category expertise a generalist competitor cannot replicate, proprietary data or IP the client cannot get elsewhere. Those things will not score cleanly on a comparability-driven matrix, and that is precisely why they are worth protecting rather than trying to make legible to it.

For clients and procurement teams running these processes, the fix is not distrust of consultants, the objectivity they bring is real and valuable. It is recognising that an evaluation framework built purely around comparability has a blind spot by construction, and if cost genuinely is not supposed to be the deciding factor, the RFP needs to say so with actual weighted teeth, not aspirational language about "value" the scoring mechanism quietly cannot enforce. Before your next pitch, check whether your own scorecard has a real, protected weight for the dimensions that matter most to you, or whether it just aims for comparability and hopes that produces the right answer by default.