When advertising gets ugly

One of the necessary evils of the advertising business is the agency review.

Pitching new business is exhilarating, demeaning, exhausting and costly. When you win, you feel like you're on top of the world. When you lose, you wonder why you even bothered.

A major pitch, like the one just announced by Bud Light, will cost participating agencies hundreds of thousands of dollars each on research, travel, spec production and all the other things required by the process. It will take the time and attention of each agency's top talent away from their best clients putting those relationships at risk. And in the end, only one will walk away with the prize.

It's a rare industry where companies give their product away with only a 20% chance of winning new business. Until somebody figures out a better way to pick a new agency, we'll continue to be put through the wringer by clients who either are naive or have unrealistic expectations about the process.

Either way, a lot of good people will waste a lot of time developing good ideas for bad beer. And that, my friends, is a damn shame.