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The Pitcheritis

Edo Smitshuijzen | 9 February 2010

The pitcher is the player throwing the ball to the player holding the bat in a baseball game. Pitching is also the name for making a bet in order to get business. When the baseball pitcher is overstraining his abilities he will suffer from 'pitcheritis'. It seems that the design world is also suffering a pitching disease of late. Apparently, the suffering has reached a level of severity that even the Belgian advertising agencies have started a short campaign to try to change clients habits. The pain must be really hard to bear.

I can imagine that being in an economy in recession and an overly abundant pitching culture must feel like being between a rock and a hard place. However, there is hardly a reason for indignation. Invitations to participate in pitches have gone a bit out of hand because it has become so easy to send out as many invitations a you like. And surprisingly, most invitations are accepted. Also today's 'normal' procedure to send in effectively finished artwork has to do with the fact that at least in graphic design 'sketch proposals' have ceased to exist. Every move made on a computer can be printed without much extra preparation. More importantly, advertising agencies have always had the commercial habit of not even having the patience to wait for a pitch invitation to arrive, they pitched for work without being invited. The cold call. Elegantly dressed dog fights have been part of advertising since its advent.

Participating in a pitch was a rarity during my career as a graphic designer. One could be asked to make an office presentation for a client or to muse with the client about how to organise a potential project. When there was, very occasionally, a design proposal competition, it was all very well organised and fairly rewarded. In most cases, clients did their homework thoroughly and spent quite some time in selecting a designer for their work. This practice must sound like a Walt Disney fairy tale to current designers. However, commercial practices have always differed substantially between one group of designers and the other. Architects, for instance, had a far more masculine dog-fight-pitch culture, which was always defended for the reason that it gave young architects a chance to break through. This sounds like a nice excuse, but so does financial innovation. In practice, even the world famous Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas pitched himself into receivership a while ago and was saved by a large engineering firm to continue his business.

At the other end of the pitch culture are the type designers who still live in a half secret Freemason-like environment where time goes much slower than elsewhere. Watch makers seem like Formula One racers by comparison. Type designers never pitch against each other and their dealings with copyright issues seem to stem from another century.

So there are huge differences in commercial habits between groups of designers and the difference was always initiated by the designer groups themselves and never by their clients. We should never forget that, a design culture is never forced upon designers; they themselves put it in place. That's how it works in the real world. So all tears are crocodile tears.

Obviously, this doesn't take away the current pain, which is real. It's is very hard to reverse a commercial habit, but I have the impression that well organised design groups have learned to deal with a pitch culture gone mad. Only clueless clients indulge in boundless pitches. Cluesless clients can only help themselves and thus best left in peace. The Belgian wake-up call is embarrassingly obvious in content and directed to the wrong audience. If there will be a change, it will be done by own hands.

And in general, if you have too much appetite you're more likely to eat something that's bad for you.

The Belgian campaign

About the Belgian campaign

Pitching at 103