The Pitch Paradox: Why healthcare agencies and marketers keep talking past each other ~via Sabrina Traskos and Cassandra Sinclair
Fantastic insight here thanks to Sabrina Traskos and Cassandra Sinclair.
When brand teams and agencies keep talking past each other, it’s not a lack of talent… it’s a lack of shared understanding and process.
You’ve hit the nail on the head… brand teams are asked to deliver more content, faster, with fewer resources, agencies want to push creative boundaries, and procurement has the power to change the game.
Collaboration, alignment around objectives, and mutual trust aren’t just nice, they’re more necessary now than ever before. The fact that you’re highlighting this so clearly matters.
Brand teams, agencies, and procurement leadership… PLEASE embrace this as the moment where partnership trumps pitches.
Thanks for championing that move, Sabrina and Cassandra. /Ted
Pharma marketers constantly call for “breakthrough creative” and “disruptive solutions” during the request for proposal (RFP) process. Agencies respond with bold campaigns designed to win hearts, minds and awards. But once the pitch is won, the resulting work is often safer, slower and stripped of risk.
This paradox isn’t just creative frustration, it’s a structural drain. Agencies spend millions of dollars on concepts that never make it to market, and clients waste months in selection cycles only to end up with cautious output.
Both sides claim they want innovation, but they’re actually optimizing for survival — leaving a gap between what pharma marketers aim for and what agencies deliver.
A system built on contradiction
In the past, brands began their Agency of Record search 24 to 30 months before launch, giving agencies time to explore ideas and unmet needs. Now, financial pressures have cut that to roughly 18 months, leaving little creative runway.
The RFP process has become less about identifying the best idea and more about reconciling a hidden tension: innovation versus risk tolerance.
Meanwhile, omnichannel personalization has multiplied the asset load — and marketers now request three to 10 times more content than before. With less time to produce more output, creativity is often the first casualty and those brand-defining ideas tend to get diluted or lost.
The three-way disconnect
At the heart of this gap is a cycle that’s defined by three common steps:
Clients write in briefs that they’re seeking award-winning creative and disruptive engagement.
Agencies propose bold, category-defining work with recognition potential.
Clients ultimately select risk-managed partners who can deliver compliant, fast, stakeholder-approved campaigns, overlooking the original bold idea.
A 2024 CMI Media Group survey found that over half of pharma marketers “dial down risk” post-pitch due to leadership or compliance pressure. Agencies, in turn, say more than 70% of winning concepts are abandoned before production. The result is a repeated loop of ambition leading to compromise.
Why healthcare is different
Healthcare’s realities stack the deck against breakthrough work for a variety of reasons:
Budgets are approved too late for bold ideas to survive.
Brand teams run lean, with little political capital to defend risk.
Legal and medical affairs teams prioritize zero error over creative experimentation.
Omnichannel demands, while prioritized on stages and in white papers, remain operationally overwhelming.
As MM+M’s 2025 Agency 100 analysis notes, agencies have shifted focus from “big ideas” to process mastery, as clients increasingly reward efficiency over originality. Creative sparks are diluted across review layers until the final product is unrecognizable, fueling the cycle of regret.
The cost of the disconnect
The cost of this disconnect looms large: Agencies lose more than $50,000 per pitch and countless billable hours, and could see team morale degrade when great ideas never see daylight. Clients are also bound to lose hundreds of hours per pitch, as well as premium fees for agencies chosen on showmanship rather than true alignment.
CMI Media’s 2024-2025 Marketplace Assessment report revealed that healthcare audiences are consuming more cross-channel content than ever, yet agency-client systems remain structurally built for a single-channel past. Two-thirds of HCPs now use social media weekly, and 78% use it for professional purposes. That means the operational lag caused by over-engineered review or underaligned strategy directly undermines audience opportunity.
Breaking the pitch cycle
The problem isn’t creative ambition versus conservatism, it’s the pitch model itself — which rewards theater, not operational truth. Here’s how to evolve the process so that it’s beneficial for all:
Reframe success metrics. Shift the definition of success from market buzz to creating real patient impact. Evaluate agencies not just on a concept, but on evidence of delivery within compliance, budget and MLR timelines.
Rethink how pitches work. The 2024 ANA Healthcare Marketing report found that pilot-based collaborations yield 27% higher satisfaction than traditional spec creative reviews. Paid working sessions or modular trials reveal real collaboration dynamics without burning weeks or months of preparation.
Align on internal truth before the brief. If leadership won’t back “category-defining” ideas, the brief shouldn’t ask for them. Brand, medical, legal and procurement stakeholders must align early on the real ask. MM+M’s 2025 collaboration data show early cross-functional integration as a top predictor of campaign success.
Define what risk really means. Some brands want safe evolution and others want smart differentiation. Some chase speed, others disruption. The key is declaring which one the brand or category needs and funding it accordingly.
From pitch theater to patient impact
In healthcare, every missed campaign is a missed moment to help patients. The responsibility for bridging this paradox lies on both sides of the table.
Clients and agencies have an opportunity to create stronger partnerships by aligning ambition with execution. When clients articulate their goals clearly and agencies design ideas that balance creativity with operational rigor, the result is work that performs as brilliantly as it inspires. Procurement can play a powerful role in this evolution by shaping RFPs that spotlight both creative ingenuity and dependable delivery, helping partnerships thrive long beyond the pitch.
The true breakthrough won’t be in the next award show, it’ll be when pitches finally measure what both sides claim to value: sustained patient impact, operational truth and creative courage that survives review.
