How does an independent agency win a procurement-led pitch?

By being decided before the scorecard opens - procurement pitches weight what can be compared, so an independent wins on the evidence and reputation the buyer already carries into the process, not on the quality of its RFP response.

The response still has to be good. It just is not where the decision gets made.

Why the scorecard works against independents

Alex Pilkington, director of growth at Mostly Media, described the format precisely in The Drum on 9 September. A portal link lands on a Friday afternoon. Inside is a weighted scorecard: 30% price, 20% "chemistry", the rest split between case studies, media owner relationships and something labelled "innovation". Ten or 12 agencies get the brief. A handful make the second round.

His argument is that this process was built to buy comparable things - inventory, production costs, rate cards you can line up and score like for like - and is now routinely used to select independents, whose value proposition is the opposite of comparable. A small senior team, continuity on the account, the willingness to say no to a bad idea. None of those fit in a column.

He gives a specific example. Mostly Media's last scorecard marked the agency down because it did not charge for planning. The feature a client would value was a negative on the sheet.

That is the structural problem. A scorecard rewards what is easy to evidence in a document, and the things independents are best at are the hardest to evidence in a document.

AI has flattened the part procurement can see

Pilkington makes a second point that matters more each quarter. The outputs procurement likes to compare - the decks, the audience models, the formatted strategy documents - are now cheap to produce. Every agency in a 12-way pitch can submit a polished, thoroughly researched response overnight.

So the written response has stopped separating agencies. When twelve submissions look equally competent, the scorer falls back on the lines that still vary, which are usually price and whatever impression each agency made before the portal opened.

A procurement pitch is scored in the portal, but it is usually decided by what the buyer believed before the portal existed.

Where the decision is actually made

Procurement-led processes are not impossible for independents. Pilkington notes that Mostly Media recently won a significant household brand through one. And Martin Woolley, chair of the Alliance of Media Independents, told him that indie-only media pitch lists were almost unheard of before Covid and are now routine.

The shift underneath is that the longlist is increasingly built on reputation. Pilkington's own proposal for a better process starts with smaller shortlists built on reputation rather than a scattergun RFI. Whether or not procurement adopts it formally, marketers already work that way informally. The agencies they champion internally are the ones they could defend before the brief was written.

That is where an independent has room to move. The levers sit upstream of the RFP:

Evidence a buyer can repeat. Results with a baseline and a period, awards from schemes the client's sector recognises, coverage in titles their leadership reads. Proof that survives being forwarded to a CFO without the agency in the room.

A proposition that reads as a product. Aruna Natarajan, chief client officer for North America at Assembly Global and a Drum Awards juror, told The Drum that agencies should start "thinking about the agency like a brand, ensuring there is a strong product and value proposition and identifying a clear ideal customer profile". An agency that can say what it is for, and for whom, is far easier for a marketer to champion against a price-weighted sheet.

Named senior people with visible views. The small senior team is the independent's real product. If those people have no public record, the scorecard's "chemistry" line is doing all the work, and 20% is not enough to overturn price.

Each of those takes quarters to build, which is precisely why they separate agencies when the documents do not.

What the opposite extreme tells you

A week before Pilkington's piece ran, PepsiCo moved its global media account to Publicis without any pitch, after a capabilities review.

The two formats look like opposites: one briefs a dozen agencies and scores them line by line, the other briefs nobody. They reward the same thing. In both, the agency that wins is the one whose case was already made before the process started. The twelve-way pitch just takes longer to reach the conclusion.

The tell-tales of an agency losing on the scorecard

These patterns show up consistently among independents who reach procurement stages and fall out of them.

The agency treats the RFP as the main event and pours weeks of senior time into the written response, while its website, case studies and public profile have not changed in a year. The case studies submitted describe activity rather than outcomes, so they score the same as everyone else's. The senior team named in the response is not the team the client has ever heard of. The agency enters every portal it is invited into, which spreads effort across processes it had no reputational standing in. And it reads a loss as a pricing problem, when the price was only the tiebreaker on a sheet where nothing else separated the entrants.

None of those is fixed in the week before submission. They are fixed in the year before the invitation.

If you are being invited into procurement processes and losing on the tiebreaker, that is worth a conversation.