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![Two people stand in front of a large "WE [heart] PITCHING" sculpture in a lively city plaza. This scene, featured in We Love Pitching Part 1, captures the creative buzz highlighted by Stash Media’s guest editorial. Frame from Stash Magazine article.](https://www.stashmedia.tv/wp-content/uploads/We-Love-Pitching-Part-1-Guest-editorial-by-Claus-Cibilis-_-STASH-MAGAZINE-960x540.jpg)
In Part 3 of his guest editorial series We Love Pitching, Nerdo ECD Claus Cibils continues his surgical (and passionate) dissection of the creative pitch process with an examination of why more is not always better.
The bigger, the better, right? Not exactly.
Pitching is not an all-you-can-eat buffet, where unlimited options sound like heaven. More reels, more names, more references look good on paper: a stronger process, more competition, more options. In practice, it is often more than anyone can chew.
And that is where the distortion begins. The system scaled its volume: more agencies, more studios, more data, more testing. But it did not scale its capacity, its ability to collaborate, evaluate, or support the work. That imbalance quietly distorts the entire process.
At first, it looks logical: comparison reduces perceived risk. Competition protects access. Inclusion feels democratic. But when participation expands faster than the system’s ability to brief, discuss, and review the work, openness becomes overload, and overload changes how creativity enters the system.
“Pitching is not an all-you-can-eat buffet, where unlimited options sound like heaven.”
Today, many pitches begin abruptly. A brief circulates widely. Studios receive a request for a reel or relevant work, with a twenty-four-hour turnaround implied. Ten or fifteen responses arrive quickly. A shortlist often appears three or four days later.
From the outside, the process appears efficient: interest confirmed, candidates identified. Beneath that efficiency, the real dynamics unfold differently.
The first filter is not a creative evaluation. It is pattern recognition, because this stage happens before a proper introduction call, before a Q&A session, sometimes even before the commissioning structure itself is fully clear.
When dozens of portfolios arrive in a compressed window, deep evaluation becomes impossible. Creative teams scan quickly:
• Does the work resemble the reference?
• Does the aesthetic align with the campaign style?
• Does the reel signal the ability to execute within that visual language?
Under those conditions, the fastest way to sort is by visual similarity. Work that echoes precedent moves forward. Work that diverges requires time to interpret. And time is the one resource the system does not have. Innovation is rarely rejected deliberately. It simply struggles to pass the first filter.
The result is ironic: the process designed to discover new thinking often begins by selecting what already looks familiar. You need to prove that you have done it before. Innovation can wait its turn.
This filtering stage also removes something essential to any creative process: dialogue. In a healthier system, early stages would include brief conversations. A fifteen-minute introduction. A chance to hear how a studio interprets the brief. A moment to understand how they think.
“The result is ironic: The process designed to discover new thinking often begins by selecting what already looks familiar. You need to prove that you have done it before. Innovation can wait its turn.”
Those exchanges reveal things a reel cannot: whether the team understands the strategic problem, whether they challenge assumptions, and whether they might bring an unexpected approach.
But when twenty studios are invited, those conversations become impossible. Twenty calls require time. Time requires commitment, precisely the time the system removed earlier.
So the structure adapts. Conversation disappears. Filtering replaces dialogue. The process speeds up, information thins, and selection becomes transactional, not interpretive.
At times, it feels uncomfortably similar to AI résumé screening. The system looks for patterns first. Understanding comes later, if at all. Once understanding is delayed at the point of entry, the rest of the process inherits the distortion.
Follow Claus on LinkedIn and Instagram.
WE LOVE PITCHING: Let’s change the way we play the game.
DISCLAIMER: All images are AI-generated. If it feels real, uncomfortable, or a little ridiculous, it’s intentional. Artificially made. Human crafted.
