dear friends
I reproduce below a good article in India PR Blog. We had discussed about this in prpoint group few months back, and some where we did not continue further. I request members to share their views on "whether PR Agencies can charge pitch fee". You are wlecome to share your views frankly
srinivasan
Moderator
Much have been discussed about PR agencies' yearning desire to protect their intellectual properties they share with a potential client during a pitch process. Typically the problem starts when a company starts inviting say 15 PR agencies for a pitch, ask for rounds of presentations to finally select one agency. This sounds ideal from a hiring company's point of view. they get to select the best agency and gets tons of free ideas and tips for their communications requirements. But for the rest of the 14 agencies that didn't get selected, imagine the time and resources wasted.PR agencies have not been able to make much headway into addressing this issue. Earlier a post on Open RFPs and a reader commented that charging a pitch fee could be a solution. The comments is as follows:
It would be great to see clients apply the same methodology towards their advisors such as KPMG/PwC and the like.. surely they would not put forth a strategy without agreeing on fees and signing on the dotted line!
I couldn't agree more. I think it is high time there is a serious discussion on whether PR agencies should start charging clients pitch fees. One factor that seem to have work against this is the intense competition in the PR market and agencies feel that if they are the only one to ask for a pitch fee, they might lose out on important RFPs. This could be addressed if PR associations like PRCAI and PRSI take this pro-actively and if some of the bigger agencies start charging. That could be a start.
On a realistic note, I know it's easier said than done. Unlike the ad industry, there are no 'INS accreditation' tag that agencies would fear of losing. So nobody would listen one another. But there is no harm dreaming.
I would love to hear what some of the industry leaders say about this.
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