May 8, 2026

Winning Agency Pitches With Real Insights

By Philippa Senior · 2 minute read

About the Author

Philippa is Head of Content at ScanmarQED, where she defines the company’s content strategy at the intersection of marketing, data, and thought leadership. She leads the development of content across all product lines—from white papers and blogs to website content—ensuring clarity, consistency, and relevance. Her work focuses on translating complex data and analytics concepts into clear, insight-led narratives that support better decision-making. Previously, she served as Head of Learning, where she created ScanmarQED’s Marketing Mix Modeling certification program.

The New Business Pitch

As a wide-eyed twenty-something, one lesson I learned early on was the theater of the new business pitch. The agency would be dressed up; surveys done of staff; research presented, and the attention to detail was simply staggering. This was all about setting ourselves apart from the competition. Had we really shown a good understanding of their challenges? Did we know their audience? Were we the best people they’d met?

As part of the analytics team (then called Brand Science), we were occasionally lucky enough to participate in these pitches by providing evidence of how we would measure and improve campaign effectiveness for these clients. Without doubt, the most important part of this process was being able to demonstrate how we could run this process. Every agency that the client was seeing said what they were going to do, but it was our job to demonstrate that this was more than just words –we had the tools and ability to back this up. Actions speak louder than words!

Effectiveness In The Agency Pitch

Fast forward a number of years and from what I still see, this situation remains the case. Clients should enjoy an agency pitch, but perhaps more than ever before they want to know how the agency thinks about effectiveness – how will they adjust and adapt campaigns to account for lessons learnt along the way?

At ScanmarQED we provide agencies with the tools that they need to help demonstrate and optimize effectiveness for their clients. Our [modelQED] and [strataQED] tools help the agency quantify effectiveness whilst [optimiseQED] and [portfolioQED] tools helps them to plan more effectively.

Demonstrate Your Effectiveness

Any clients who see these solutions in action (and we do know that these tools appear in many pitch situations) will quickly see an agency who has considered how they can plan for the most effective campaigns. It’s not enough to simply talk about effectiveness – they need to demonstrate how they will deliver effectiveness. Modern agencies are becoming akin to technology hubs. Many of their clients will be amazed (and perhaps intimidated) at the data savvy the agency staff possess. Of course, the technology is just one element of this, but it’s vital that agencies can demonstrate their point-of-view on how technology can enable them to deliver results – we all recognize that it’s no longer just about how many brightly colored charts they can display in one meeting!