Cameleon Web Design Agency - The Best Web Design CompanyArticles, blog & viewsSpeculative work and unpaid pitch, no thanks!
Speculative work and unpaid pitch, no thanks!
Caméléon Média does not participate in any "unpaid pitch", does not do any speculative work and does not take part in any contest in hope to obtain website design or web application development mandates. We respect and value the quality of our work. We believe this method is harmful to our industry and we are convinced that it also hurts organizations practicing it - customers or suppliers.
On the other hand, our team is happy to meet any company or association willing to evaluate our seriousness, our credibility, and our skills. We are very pleased to present our past achievements and we are happy to conduct interviews to validate our understanding of a project.
Unpaid pitch and speculative work, what is it?
Speculative work involves producing creative, technical or strategic work for which the agency is not remunerated unless they are chosen for the project. This means that interested agencies have to present visual models (most often, the home page) as well as a proposal of graphics line in the documentation presented to a call of a tender bid.
This practice is criticized by many agencies and professional associations. The Association of creative communications agencies (A2C), the Society of Graphic Designers of Quebec (SDGQ) and the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC) all clearly stand against speculative work.
The creative agency Zulu Alpha Kilo has produced a very interesting video that well expresses our position on the matter.
Nobody wins
As a customer, whether it's a business or an organization, it's easy to get caught up and believe that a competitive selection process is a good idea. With little or no knowledge in the digital world, members of a selection committee can’t see the big picture nor recognize the consequences of a process that focus on the container rather than on the content.
Without preliminary meetings, reflections and exchanges with the client, it’s impossible to establish a clear strategy or direction to design a Web project. The agency wishing to obtain a mandate in this context will only show the client what he wants to see and only tell him what he wants to hear, all in order to impress him.
Any web agencies that care about detail and quality work, like Cameleon Media, have to induct money in producing visual models for a website, those fees can be pretty high. It is not enough to choose a beautiful prefabricated template on a preprogrammed platform and fill it with the logo and colors of the customer. Several days of work and research should be invested to create a unique visual that precisely matches the needs of the client.
Our conclusion
You wouldn’t ask a construction contractor, a restaurant owner or a hairdresser to work for free just to choose the one you prefer. When selecting a web agency, it should not be an exception.