TrinityP3 has reworked and rebuilt its Agency Register with a new AI capability, giving marketers running their own pitches the chance to find more, perhaps overlooked agencies.
TrinityP3 has been operating its Agency Register database, which lists thousands of different agencies, for years but generative AI has made it easily searchable.
The new Agency Register uses the Claude LLM and is still free for agencies to sign up to. Clients will be able to issue a set number of prompts per month for a monthly fee. There’s a significantly reduced rate for a year’s access to the tool, Woolley told B&T.
The move comes as marketers are increasingly running their own pitches, rather than employing the services of a pitch consultant à la Trinity P3.
“Our research clearly shows how over the past two years consultants are only managing around one in five pitches, with the rest managed mainly through marketers and their procurement teams 60 per cent and 20 per cent respectively,” said Darren Woolley, global CEO of TrinityP3.
However, that increase in the number of client-side marketers running their own agency pitches is not due to a dissatisfaction with pitch consultants or, indeed, a growing dissatisfaction with agencies.
Instead, Woolley told B&T it reflects an unavoidable but perhaps unpleasant reality.
Agency retainer models are increasingly falling by the wayside with project-based pitching taking their place. The refreshed Agency Register tool is not designed to exacerbate project-based pitching, only make it easier for the correct agencies to be found by the right clients. These project-based pitches do not require clients to invest in a consultant.
Woolley and the TrinityP3 team also noted a major global and regional pitches managed outside of the Australian market by in-house procurement and marketing teams. Increased demand on marketing budgets and a demand by businesses that marketers should manage their own tender processes have also played a role.
“Our Agency Register has long been an important resource for our team of consultants,” said Woolley.
“Helping us to look at the plethora of agencies and consider the right agencies for pitches that we ran. This has long been used to inform what agencies were in the market and available, and information such as offices, key personnel, ownership, size, clients, capabilities, awards, agency values and more.
“Now we are democratising that information for marketers who often struggle to find the right agencies to invite for tender.
“Our experience shows two major problems for marketers running their own pitch: they underestimate the time and resources required to manage a pitch and how disruptive this is to the marketing business,” continued Woolley.
“And they have real difficulty identifying suitable agencies to invite for tender. Many marketers will resort to either a Google search, or asking friends or colleagues, or in the worst case scenario, an open tender with hundreds of agencies responding, or an EOI or RFI process—this process often wastes tremendous resources on both sides.”
Now, marketers will be able to issue prompts such as “I’m looking for a bespoke creative agency based in Melbourne with experience in the automotive sector”.
The portal will then return a list of agencies of that size, with that experience and in the city. These can then be tweaked and evaluated by the marketer to find and unearth more agencies.
One thing important to note is that Woolley and the TrinityP3 team do not have control over the responses provided, the Claude LLM determines the list based on the information provided by agencies.
He also doesn’t believe that the new tool will eliminate the work of pitch consultants. They will still be needed to validate agencies and run the largest pitches.
