MUMBAI: There is a quiet but rather pointed argument brewing inside India’s advertising industry, and Yash Chandiramani, founder and chief strategist of Mumbai-based agency Admatazz, is not particularly shy about where he stands on it. The question is deceptively simple: should agencies charge brands for pitching their ideas? The answer, as it turns out, is anything but.

For decades, the creative pitch has been the industry’s great ritual of courtship. Agencies pour weeks of thinking, strategy, and original ideas into elaborate presentations, present them to a room full of brand managers, and then wait. Sometimes they win the account. Often enough, they do not. And on occasion, they watch their ideas appear, lightly reworked, in a campaign they had no hand in making. All of this, historically, has been offered at no charge whatsoever.

“Giving away free creative is criminal. Its rich of me to say though as once in a while we too fall for it.”

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Chandiramani is disarmingly candid about the absurdity of it all, including his own occasional complicity. “Giving away free creative is criminal,” he says, before adding with characteristic honesty, “its rich of me to say though as once in a while we too fall for it and go all out for certain brands we think will be a lot of fun to work with.” At Admatazz, he calls such moments a ‘black swan event’ rather than a policy. The standard approach is to offer a strategic note and, when a full creative pitch is requested, to invoice for it.

The shift at Admatazz did not happen overnight. It crystallised around 2023, after a particular kind of frustration became impossible to ignore. “We had invested a lot into pitching but realised many brands, especially startups, were not coming to any decision after multiple rounds of pitching and agency auditions,” he recalls. The breaking point was a pattern that any agency founder will recognise: the D2C startup with investor money, a strong opinion about everything, and an absolute inability to decide. “We had detailed pitches with D2C startups who had shopped around with 20 agencies in one go, and it resulted in no decision at the end.” The solution, in hindsight, was obvious. “We needed them to put money on the table to show their seriousness.”

The results were not subtle. Ask him whether the quality of conversation changes when a fee is involved and he answers with characteristic economy: “Most definitely. Brands are more involved. The decision makers are involved from day one.” Money, it turns out, has a remarkable way of making the right people show up to the room.

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The obvious counterargument is that this shuts smaller brands out. Chandiramani has heard it and does not entirely buy it. “If you want to take on smaller brands, by all means you should pitch,” he says. “But don’t be under the impression that smaller brands are easier to work with.” His 2023 experience is itself the rebuttal. The agencies waiving pitch fees to land a scrappy, exciting startup are often the ones holding an empty brief and a full bill for their own time. “The whole pay-to-pitch is actually a way to filter out the less serious small brands,” he says. “The big brands are run quite professionally.”

“We’ve lost opportunities to pitch. But that doesn’t mean that’s lost business.”

Has this cost Admatazz actual business? He draws a distinction that is worth sitting with. “We’ve lost opportunities to pitch,” he acknowledges, “but that doesn’t mean that’s lost business. Such extensive pitch processes usually become a game of probability for the agency anyway. It has saved us a lot of time and helped us work for brands that are a lot more serious with their marketing.”

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He is also careful not to turn this into a blanket judgment about brands that refuse to pay. “There is nothing wrong about it from their end,” he says. “Some brands have to follow their own purchase process and rules, and it doesn’t reflect anything about the potential work relationship. We have pitched for free many times earlier and won accounts and had beautiful partnerships with brand teams.” The frustration, he clarifies, is not with any single brand’s process. It is with a broader industry habit. “It’s just that today, for every small project, brands want to audition agencies. Especially the new brands.”

“If a brand invites you to pitch and steals an idea, it is theft in the most literal sense.”

There is, of course, a darker version of this story. We ask what happens when brands take the ideas and disappear. The answer is unambiguous. “If a brand invites you to pitch and steals an idea, it is definitely something they should be held accountable for. It’s theft in the most literal sense.” The advertising industry, notoriously, has no formal mechanism to enforce this. Ideas that never become executions live in a legal grey area that most agencies cannot afford to contest. The fee, then, is not just a filter. It is the only protection available.

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We put the bigger question to him. If creativity is the product, why has the industry been so comfortable giving it away? He does not deflect. “The rules were made decades before I was born. I ask the same question. I am guilty of this sometimes too, because the industry is giving ideas for free.” There is a weariness in the admission, but also something that sounds like genuine momentum. “I do see things change slowly. Agencies are becoming a lot more careful about who they pitch to and creating their own filters before they pitch.”

He finds a source of optimism in the new generation of independent founders, many of them alumni of large networks who have struck out on their own and arrived with rather less patience for the old customs. “We learn from so many industry leaders who have started their own agencies recently. They can afford to take bold stances and we are all for it.”

What would a world look like if this became standard practice across the industry? “It’s wishful thinking,” he says, with the measured tone of someone who knows the distance between a good idea and a structural shift. “But it would lead to a lot more clarity for agencies as well as brands.” Clarity, in an industry that has long survived on ambiguity, may be the most radical thing of all.

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