“Amber Bonney is a feminist force field of brand strategy, creative leadership, sharp thinking and electric conversations and is on a mission to reshape Australian brands and business.” You have to like a woman who begins her bio like this. And she can back it up. Bonney is the founder of The Edison Agency, a B Corp certified branding and design agency in Melbourne fuelled by the credo, “the guts to see what’s broken, and the imagination to build what’s next”.

Bonney has a very definite view about pitching. Here it is:

Feel a bit brutal? Well, it is.

I have sat on this piece for a few weeks now, but not without dozens of internal monologues, a few intense phone calls to industry peers and several voice-recording rants in my iPhone notes. This is a topic I have written about before, but with less peri-menopausal rage and sensitivity to the injustice. Here’s why I care so much.

Design and advertising are not the same discipline, and they never have been. As the traditional marketing services industry contracts and new disciplines emerge, the edges between design, branding and advertising, along with their inherited practices, have blurred. The advertising industry has built its entire pitch culture around speculative creative, competing agencies, and a client holding all the power until the very end. Design agencies have typically operated differently, and many have refused free pitching outright for decades, on principle and on record. But the practice hasn’t disappeared. Over the last 12 months, I have seen an influx of requests to pitch initial strategic thinking and conceptual ideation with no fee. These have come from high-profile organisations large enough to have in-house procurement teams, or outsourced consultants managing the process.

I am sympathetic to the industry being in flux, I am. These are challenging times, and the temptation to do whatever it takes to secure a sales pipeline is real when you have mouths to feed, whether you are a solo practitioner or you have a team of employees. But here is the challenge. When an industry is divided between those who do (free pitch) and those who don’t (free pitch), everyone is impacted. For those who stand their ground on principle, the opportunities are lost outright. For those who participate, they gamble the investment, emotional toll and cultural cost to the business, whatever the odds. In the long term, both lose because the practice continues to erode the professionalism and value of our expertise as designers and strategists.

This is a heartfelt rally cry. For the agencies already refusing free pitching (I salute you), for the ones weighing whether they can afford to keep refusing, and the clients who don’t yet realise what they’re asking for when they ask for it.

Where this habit came from

Free pitching has roots in American advertising’s earliest playbook, not in design. In 1880, N.W. Ayer sent researchers across the country studying grain markets and local newspapers to win one client’s account, unpaid and before any contract existed (Horsky and Zeithammer, 2024). That set the blueprint for an entire industry: agencies proving worth through free labour instead of fee, establishing a client-choice behaviour that has since been replicated millions of times across all major markets. By the mid-twentieth century, the iconic Madison Avenue reputation turned this into a theatre sport. Late nights, Mad Men-esque art-board flip-decks filled with dreams for something better. Creative duos gambling their future employability on a single unpaid presentation, competing against three other agencies doing exactly the same thing on exactly the same brief. This isn’t fiction because it still happens today, a practice still prevalent in modern advertising agency engagement. Its influence leaks into other creative services through client expectation.

What free pitching actually is, and isn’t

Free pitching is speculative creative or strategic work, produced without payment, on the promise of a contract that may never arrive.

Free pitching is what industry body Australian Graphic Design Association (AGDA) describes in its member Code of Ethics as a predatory pricing tactic, sitting alongside loss leading and pricing below break-even (AGDA, no date).

A chemistry meeting is not free pitching. Neither is a paid discovery session. Neither is a reference call. All three build genuine confidence between client and agency, at a fair price, with a fair exchange of time.

Free pitching is not submitting a proposal with detailed methodology, insights and understanding unique to the brief, and relevant case studies outlining contextualised experience to the client’s problem. There is a real skill in doing this well.

Free pitching is not risk mitigation. I see it as risk transfer. Every ounce of it lands on the agency, the people inside it and the broader industry, not on the business asking for the work.

The gambling and misogyny nobody talks about

Every unpaid pitch bets a team’s time, expertise, agency value and mental health on a win/loss ratio that only ever thinks short-term. Pitching strains team mental health and motivation, and puts creative ideas at risk of being used even when the studio is never engaged (No Free Pitches, 2024). To continue the racing analogy, the bookie wins. The people doing the work carry the loss short term, in burnout, in underpaid hours, in ideas handed over with no protection at all, sometimes surfacing in a competitor’s campaign months later with nobody credited. The entire industry carries the loss long term through undervalued methods, process and collaborative practice. What free pitching does is reward the high-rollers, the people who love the thrill of the punt, and those who can afford to lose and shake it off, ready for the next one.

It rewards misogynistic infrastructure built on power, gambling and unethical competitive practices. I can’t speak for all creative services industries, but I can speak for mine when I say it is typically the same type of leader who disregards the integrity of a profession, in the interest of their egos and the cash in their piggy bank.

To the clients still asking for it

Most clients asking for a free pitch aren’t doing it maliciously, but are following an antiquated script, without ever seeing what it costs on the other side of the ask. Here’s what changing that behaviour actually looks like.

Clients deserve confidence before they commit which is fair and reasonable and my agency has had achieved great success delivering that confidence without the need to free pitch. Reference calls, paid discovery sessions, structured chemistry meetings — these lower-risk activities not only build confidence but also ensure cultural and creative fit, which is healthy for both parties.

Ask what a paid discovery phase would look like, instead of a free pitch. It costs money, and it gives you something a speculative deck never can: a studio’s full attention and genuine research with the benefit of a chemistry-check.

Define a pitch as a demonstration of an agency’s understanding of the brief, their experiences in solving similar problems and detailed case studies that speak to process as well as outcomes. It’s usually a stronger signal of capability than three days of rushed thinking produced for free under pressure.

Ask a studio what an unpaid pitch actually costs their team. Most will tell you honestly: hours, morale, and sometimes ideas that quietly resurface in the brief after the no.

Build a shortlist through reputation and reference. Three unpaid decks don’t tell you more than one honest conversation and a call to a past client who has lived with the work.

Notice when a tender or RFP document asks for free creative, and push back on it. That single line in a procurement process does more to normalise the practice than any individual studio’s compliance.

Ask for a list of referees you can actually call. Those conversations with peers will tell you more about genuine fit, lived experience and expertise than any speculative work will.

None of this slows a project down because it moves the cost of confidence to where it belongs, inside a fair, paid relationship, rather than onto an agency carrying risk for a project that isn’t theirs.

Why the agencies holding the line deserve backing

Design’s value sits in the thinking, not the deck. Strategic rigour, behavioural insight, portfolio architecture: this takes months to do properly, and clients are effectively buying that process whether or not they see it named on an invoice. Studios who refuse free pitching aren’t being precious. They’re protecting the conditions that make good thinking possible.

All established agencies understand that their value sits in the thinking. Strategic rigour, insight and collaborative methods, this takes months to do properly. Compress it into an unpaid pitch window and clients end up paying, eventually, for guesses made under pressure with half-arsed insights and some pretty-pictures that look finished but lack substance and rigour. Let’s call it akin to a professional Pintrest board.Studios who refuse free pitching aren’t being precious. They’re protecting the conditions that make good thinking possible.

The Edison Agency is B Corp certified, and refusing free pitching is one of the more straightforward ways that standard shows up in daily practice: fair labour, transparent value exchange, respect for the people doing the work.

Join the agencies already saying no

Like many of my peers, I signed the global No Free Pitches resolution (No Free Pitches, 2024). Supporter number 7,311, in a register that keeps growing as studios and freelancers worldwide put their name to refusing speculative work.

Every signature makes it a little harder for a tender document, a procurement process or a client brief to assume free pitching is simply how this industry runs because it isn’t and shouldn’t be, and there are enough of us who know there is another way. While this platform is only in its infancy with Australian signatories, there is an expectation that all professional members of local industry body, AGDA, abide by its defined Code of Ethics. These are the professional principles formed to establish “fair play” across the breadth of the industry, and to rally against destructive practices like free pitching.

In 2026, we recorded one of our highest performance years since 2011, coming off the back of a few horrendous low profit or break-even periods. Not fun, but we got through. My view on free pitching has been unwavering: you can run a profitable, ethical business without metaphorically strapping your professional integrity to the back of a greyhound and chasing a fake bunny around a grimy track drenched by floodlights that hurt your eyeballs.