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June 15, 2026
![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 the latest of his guest editorial series We Love Pitching, Nerdo ECD Claus Cibils details the sobering realities of how compressed pitch schedules distort both the creative process and the final solutions.
Getting in is one thing. Living up to the expectation is another.
The prelude is over. The field narrows, but the distortion does not disappear. It gets compressed. A shortlist emerges: three studios if the process is tight, five or six if the system is trying to remain inclusive. Now the real pitch begins.
Concepts develop. Treatments are written. Visual exploration begins. Each team invests serious creative effort.
“Creative thinking does not behave well under compression. Ideas need distance. They need conversation. They need time to evolve.”
Ideally, this moment should be the project’s creative gestation: a time for ideas to grow, exploration to deepen, assumptions to be challenged, and agency and studio to begin shaping the project together.
Instead, the structure compresses that entire process into a week. Sometimes less. Even with only three studios involved, that barely leaves enough space to understand the problem, let alone explore it properly.
Creative thinking does not behave well under compression. Ideas need distance. They need conversation. They need time to evolve.
Forty hours of thinking spread over two to three weeks produce a very different result than forty hours squeezed into five days. The number of hours may be the same. The thinking is not. Creativity needs some breathing room.
Studios rarely work in isolation, either. They are delivering projects already in production while agencies are managing multiple campaigns simultaneously.
With deadlines looming, the pitching setup often asks everyone involved to temporarily pause their worlds to generate speculative work at full throttle. As the pace accelerates, the work begins to change.
Exploration narrows. Assumptions go unchallenged. The safest ideas become easier to recognize.
“Forty hours of thinking spread over two to three weeks produce a very different result than forty hours squeezed into five days.”
And if the shortlist expands beyond three participants, the imbalance becomes even more visible: more proposals, less time to discuss them, less space to explore them. The system asks for depth, but it allocates speed.
Earlier in the process, volume appeared as the number of invitations. At this stage, it appears as something else: time.
More participants. Less space to think. The system grows larger. The creative window grows smaller, and the truth is, we all help sustain this dynamic. We send the reels. We accept the timelines. We jump into the race.
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.
