[Charlie Carpenter] tells The Drum that, despite being a signatory of the Pledge, he also thinks it has some fundamental limitations.

“There are lots of good things about the Pledge; it’s raised awareness of the issues… and it has got people talking about whether the pitch is fit for purpose in this day and age, about what we could do that might improve it. I just don’t think it goes far enough in terms of trying to drive real fundamental change in behaviors in pitching.”

In particular, Carpenter argues that it doesn’t go far enough in ensuring agencies get paid for the time and IP lost during the pitch process for closer enforcement to be useful. “A lot of what it talks about, such as being clear about budgets or transparency over when a decision is going to be made, are hygiene factors.”

Though Creativebrief uses the Pledge as a resource with clients, he says that it doesn’t actually propose they run the pitch based on the principles of the Pledge. “We actually push them to go further than that. Our point of view – and I can’t by any means tell you that we win this argument with every client that we talk to – is that asking agencies to give away free thinking and free creative ideas during the pitch process... is asking them to give away their most valuable commodity. That does nothing to reinforce the value of commercial creativity. In fact, it does everything to completely undermine it.”

Read the full article on The Drum.