Viewpoint
Not Everything Can Be Pitched
The line sat at the bottom of the email, reduced to a smaller font as if modesty could disguise intent: “Quick pitch.”
It never is.
I should say upfront: I’ve done this many times. I’ve stayed up pulling together decks, written strategy for brands I’d never paid to think about, sent over “just a few thoughts” that were really weeks of thinking compressed into something that could be skimmed in ten minutes. This objection isn’t theoretical. It’s a slow, accumulated one.
The pitch, as we know it, is not some eternal feature of creative work. Almost as soon as thinking became the product, when agencies first hired writers and artists, and had something other than ad space to sell, clients began asking to see it before they paid for it.
They understood, immediately, that ideas could be sold. And immediately figured out they could ask for free.
More than a hundred years later, most of us are still giving it away.
A pitch is never just a pitch. It is every past project, every failed idea, every instinct you’ve sharpened quietly over time, compressed into something that can be evaluated in a room that may or may not understand what it’s looking at.
What I’ve grown suspicious of is the theatre of it. You learn quickly how to look like you’ve solved a problem, even when you’ve only begun to understand it. You learn how to perform expertise.
Real expertise rarely looks like certainty. It looks like hesitation.
Like asking better questions instead of offering immediate answers. Slower, less photogenic, harder to compress into ten slides. When pitching becomes a system where creatives repeatedly perform high- level thinking without compensation, it stops being an opportunity. It becomes an extraction.
For a long time, I thought being-taken seriously meant being-chosen. Now I think it means being-understood. And pitching, in its current form, almost always prioritises the former over the latter.
Maybe the future isn’t about abolishing it, but about slowing it down. Making space for process, not just presentation. Valuing depth of thinking, not just clarity of delivery. Because if lived experience and memory are what make you an expert, then we need to be more careful about how and how often we ask people to prove it.
