The Advertising Association of Ghana (AAG) has expressed the need for customers to be surcharged when they invite about 10 or more companies to pitch ideas over a period only to ignore them to pick another company.

“The area of instituting pitch fees. I sincerely believe that it is extremely important. I don’t think we can afford to continue allowing clients to invite 10, 15, sometimes 20 agencies to do beauty parades,” Mr Joel Edmund Nettey, President of the Advertising Association of Ghana said during the 26th Annual General meeting in Accra.

“Go and do the work, come and present and the client decides sometimes long before you have even done the work, they know exactly where they are going. Yet we do the beauty parades, waste our time and energy resources,” he explained.

The pitch fees when successfully implemented will help agencies cover some costs incurred during the pitching period.

Mr. Nettey charged all members of the association to come to an agreement and act towards making ‘pitch fees” effective, adding that having some agencies shy away from it will only be detrimental to committed members and the Association as a whole.

“I am a realist enough to recognize that this will only remain a dream if we first cannot unite around the long term benefits this means for us all. If four or five agencies decide that they will not take part in any pitch where there are no pitch fees and everybody else decides to go, those four or five will continue to lose out,” he mentioned.

“How more can they afford to be the sign markers for our industry? Plus, will the clients take us seriously if five agencies don’t attend but 25 others do attend. If we are going to make a success of this then all of us big or small have to agree to work together because it benefits us all,” he noted.

Mr. Nettey said the pitch fees only apply to customers who have shortlisted a number of agencies out of a lot and have asked them to present their strategies based on a brief.

He added that once a customer does that, they have virtually asked the agency to work for them and so not picking them at the end of the day for the final project should come at a cost.

“When you invite an agency for a pitch. Several agencies parade, because they are just showing you their stuff. Out of that list, you shortlist and decide that four or five or whatever you can afford should then come and present to you base on a brief. And so now you are judging based on their actual ability to do [the] work. Now, because at that stage you have commissioned them to do [the] work, and so that is when pitch fees come in. Those who do the work but do not meet your standard get paid a certain token amount at least to cover the cost of the work they have done,” he explained.”