Twenty years ago, as an exchange student in Hong Kong, I spent a lot of time in cha chaan teng – the working-class cafés that took Western dining and made it fast, cheap, and entirely local. The menus, usually laminated, corners peeling, were dominated by something called sets. I was bewildered. The Foam set: milk tea, French toast, a side of rice. The Frog set: mostly green foods, logic opaque to the outsider. You got the outline of a meal rather than any sense of how it would taste.
Too many proposals give me the same feeling. Donald Trump, whatever else you think of him, accidentally coined the perfect phrase for it: concepts of a plan. I’ve received too many concepts of a proposal.
The financial communications proposal has developed the same grammar as the set menu. Executive programme. Influence programme. Spokesperson programme. It sounds like comprehensiveness. It reads like a strategy. Mostly, it’s a way of bundling things nobody asked for individually, assembled in the hope that something lands.
I’ve seen proposals run to hundreds of slides. I’ve written ones that stretch over dozens of pages – essentially thousands of data points thrown at a wall in the hope that one tips the balance. I’m an editor by training. I should know better.
This didn’t start with AI. The copy-paste proposal has been endemic for years — last year’s deck, client name swapped, recycled strategy given a new cover. AI has simply industrialised what lazy hands were already doing. The baseline proposal is now effortless to produce. Which means the baseline is worthless.
The psychology behind the sprawl has a name: additive defensiveness. It lives on the agency side, and it’s completely understandable. Someone lost a pitch once on a single unanswered question and never forgot it. So the next proposal gets that answer added. And the next. And the next. Until the deck is a defensive structure dressed as a strategy.
Box-scored RFPs can reward coverage over thinking. Gotcha questions designed to break a tie rarely find the best agency. They find the most defended one. If there’s a genuine gap but the agency is otherwise in contention, go back and ask. Using that gap as a gotcha doesn’t produce the best result. It produces the most cautious agency.
What actually works is the opposite. Go deeper on one or two things. Front-load the real thinking – the thing that will genuinely be different. Avoid slide-plaining: a detailed explanation of how to pitch a press release under embargo is going to feel at minimum redundant, and at worst offensive, when presented to someone who has been doing this for 20 years.
Not long ago, I lost a significant pitch. The primary feedback was that my ideas were too ambitious, beyond the scope of what the office could deliver. That felt fine. In baseball, striking out with a full swing is more satisfying than being called out on a slider that nips the corner. At least you know what you were trying to do.
Most people – whether in-house or agency-side – have a subconscious sense of when something has been assembled rather than argued. The argument has jumps in lieu of transition. Slide six doesn’t earn slide seven – and you really have to squint to see the connection with slide eight. There’s a sense of an argument that’s in wind-up mode. Anticipation but no climax.
What is needed is the courage to cut. Omission used correctly is as powerful as any addition. The strongest proposals – like the best meals – come from knowing exactly what you want and ordering each dish deliberately.
Then you’re set.
