A few years ago, a client invited my agency to pitch. We gave it weeks of work: a full strategy, creative territories, a finished deck. We presented; they nodded; they thanked us. That’s it. No bad or good news, the pitch just disappeared.
We weren’t the only agency through that door that month. The account always landed with the agency the client had already chosen before the parade started. The rest of us filled the room and, as it turned out, donated ideas. A concept we built for that pitch surfaced later, carrying someone else’s name.
Nobody had signed anything. There was no pitch fee. There was no rule saying a client can’t summon ten agencies, keep the best thinking from each, and pay none of them. We grumbled to each other over coffee, the way agencies do. Then we went back and did it again the next month, for the next client, because refusing meant handing the work to whoever didn’t refuse.
The association that does nothing
We have an association for exactly this. P3I is supposed to represent the advertising industry in Indonesia. In twenty years, I have never seen it set a single rule that changed how a pitch runs, how ideas get protected, or how many shops a client can line up for free. It holds events and hands out awards. It has never asked its own members to give up anything.
Why the race to the bottom is structural
For years, I read this as a manners problem. Greedy clients, spineless agencies. I was wrong about the cause. The behavior is structural: the structure people work inside shapes what they do far more than their intentions. When no one will set and hold a floor, price becomes the only language left in the room. You can’t compete on judgment when judgment is the free sample. So agencies compete on what stays visible: who charges the least, who throws in the most for nothing. The race to the bottom is just what rational people do when the rules are missing. The same way companies engineer friction when nothing stops them, clients run cattle-call pitches because the system rewards it.
The same problem at the DPR
Last month I watched a clip from a hearing at Komisi VII in the DPR. A producer named Nicki RV, who runs a small house called 786 Productions, broke down in front of the committee. His account was that around five players control which films get dozens of releases each year and direct access to cinema screens, while small houses are left with almost no room to show their work. He asked the state to establish a body to regulate distribution so the big players can’t simply own the market.
Different industry, same setup. Film, advertising, anywhere the people who make the work have no collective floor under them, whoever controls access sets the terms, and the makers underbid each other for scraps. Nicki was talking about cinema screens. I’ve watched the same thing play out in pitch rooms for twenty years.
A working association makes rules that cost its own members something now so the craft survives later. A pitch above a certain scope carries a fee. Ideas presented in a pitch stay owned by the agency that made them. Members hold the standard by walking away when a client breaks it. None of this is radical. Other markets already do it. It needs only enough players willing to hold one line together, which is the entire reason an association exists.
P3I, or whatever replaces it, needs one thing it has never had: the nerve to make its own members uncomfortable. Until it does, every agency in Jakarta will keep walking into rooms to give away the only thing it actually sells, and we’ll keep calling that “just how the business works.” Every rigged game runs on that sentence.
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