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INPUT
You bring the brief.
RFP, brand context, the audit, whatever intel you've gathered. The sprint reads it the way a CSO reads it on a Sunday night — not to compress, but to find what's missing.
$12B lost to the US pitch process. 175 hours per pitch. 48% win rate, falling. We give the hours back to the thinking that decides the outcome.
For agency CSOs, planning leads, —
and heads of new business who pitch eight or more times a year.
Forty-seven pages. Brand history, category dynamics, segmentation study, two consumer reports, a competitive audit from 2023, a deck of past creative the client liked, a deck of past creative the client didn't like, three pages of evaluation criteria written by someone who has never bought media.
You have 96 hours before the first internal standup. By Friday, the team is supposed to walk in with a territory.
You read. You annotate. You start building a working deck. Wednesday afternoon the client sends a clarification email that quietly changes the brief. Two of your slides are now wrong. You rework them. Thursday night, planning surfaces a tension nobody had named. It reframes the whole thing. You rework them again.
Friday morning. Senior review. The room listens, asks three questions, and points the team in a different direction. The territory you've been sharpening for four days isn't the one you're going to pitch. You go back and start over.
This is the ritual. Every agency does it. The 96 hours go to assembly, rework, and pivots — not to the thinking that decides the outcome.
Most AI tools converge. They summarize, compress, smooth. Run the same brief through five times and you get five versions of the same competent, average answer — the median of everything that's ever been written about your category. That's the opposite of what a pitch needs.
The Pitch Sprint is built the other way. Designed to do what a senior strategist does on their best day: find the angle nobody's working, the contradiction nobody's named, the small detail in the category that becomes the whole thing. Not the obvious read. The one that makes the rest of the team lean in.
RFP, brand context, the audit, whatever intel you've gathered. The sprint reads it the way a CSO reads it on a Sunday night — not to compress, but to find what's missing.
Unexpected entry points. Tensions you weren't looking for. Cultural threads, structural contradictions, overlooked vectors — surfaced with enough specificity that you can argue with them, not just nod at them.
Three or four jumping-off points — sharp, specific, defensible. Not a finished POV. The strategic raw material that makes you say "wait, that one." Take it to the team. Argue with it.
~160 hours saved per pitch. ~$40,000 saved per pitch. The point isn't the time — it's that the time goes back where it should have been: on the thinking.
Deck design, faster. RFP responses, auto-drafted. Research, compiled in seconds. Project management, dashboarded. All useful. None of it touches the part that actually decides whether you win.
The hard work of a pitch isn't moving information around. It's making sense of it. Finding the tension the brief doesn't name. Holding three contradictory signals from the client and the category at the same time and noticing what they reveal. Spotting the angle nobody else in the room is going to walk in with.
That work doesn't get faster because you have a better summarizer. It gets faster when you have a thinking partner — something that pushes back, opens angles, surfaces tensions you weren't looking for, and helps you see the brief from a vantage point you wouldn't have found alone.
Every other AI tool is built to compress information. The pitch doesn't need compression. It needs interpretation.
An agency pitching ten times a year, at $44K per pitch, spends roughly $440,000 in unbilled time annually — and walks away from more than half of it empty-handed. The 1,913 cumulative hours per year (OUCH!, 2021) translate to nearly an entire FTE working full-time on pitches that mostly lose.
Multiply across the ~15,000 agencies in the US market (IBISWorld, 2025), and unbilled hours alone are burning roughly $6.6B a year. Add senior leadership time, production, freelance, and travel, and the industry-wide bill is around $12 billion a year of unbilled, unrecoverable, mostly-losing work.
Sources: OUCH! Factor Report (New Business Methodology, 2021–2023); CubeYou Agency Survey (2015); Duval Partnership pitch cost analysis (2022); IBISWorld US Advertising Agencies report (2025); VoxComm Cost of the Pitch Report.
Twenty years on the pitch floor — Edelman, VMLY&R, Saatchi & Saatchi. Strategy lead on pitches for Nike, Guinness, White Claw, Hulu, Unilever, Diageo. I know what those hours feel like, because I've spent them. I know what it's like to read a brief on Monday and rewrite the whole strategy on Thursday because the client said one sentence on a call that changed everything.
The Pitch Sprint isn't a theory about how pitches should work. It's the diagnostic I started running on every brief, on my own, after the tenth time I watched a senior team waste two days on assembly when we should have been arguing about the territory.
It's the part of the work I always wanted more time for, made fast enough to actually do.
— Thiago Bersou, Founder, Panama Red
You're a head of new business, a CSO, a planning director, an agency owner. You're at an independent that pitches eight or more times a year, or a holding company innovation unit that gets pulled into every brief that lands.
You've watched the same pattern: the team works around the clock, the deck gets built, and the strategic frame — the one or two moves that should have anchored the pitch — never gets the time it deserves. Not because nobody's smart enough. Because nobody had the hours.
You don't need another tool that summarizes the brief. You need the part of the work that decides the outcome to be the part you can actually do.
If your team pitches more than eight times a year, you should be one of them.