Agencies Trade Pitch Decks For Speed As Rapid Testing Replaces Long Planning Cycles

The traditional agency pitch is losing relevance fast. As clients grow more sophisticated and the media landscape explodes into hundreds of channels and deliverables, slow, slide-heavy RFP processes can’t keep up. For boutique agencies, survival now depends on speed, adaptability, and proving value in market, not in meetings.

John Geletka is a multi-disciplinary marketing executive who saw this change coming. As the Founder of Geletka+, an agency recognized by the Inc. 5000 for its high growth, and a member of the Forbes Agency Council, speed is one of his agency's foundational principles. With a background that includes both agency leadership and client-side roles, he says agency founders must now evolve to satisfy clients' pressing needs.

"The pitch process we followed for twenty years was built for a slower market. Today, if I can take two months of proposal time and spend it in market, I’ve already made progress," says Geletka. He argues that agencies build trust today not with glossy promises, but immediate action and live problem solving. This means less speculative presentations and more co-collaboration. He advises less flair, more results.

• Ding dong, the pitch is dead: Geletka says the traditional pitch no longer delivers an advantage, explaining, "We’ve had a higher close rate with simple, written email proposals than with beautiful, time-intensive pitch decks filled with case studies." To keep pace, he adds, agencies have to unlearn long planning cycles and adopt a more agile way of working, saying, "You learn while you’re doing it now, not before you do it, because real-time feedback in market is more valuable than months of internal debate."

• Months to moments: The compression of time is significant adjustment for agencies used to months of research. "We've had to unlearn a lot of traditional agency processes of concepting," he says. Geletka gives an example of a fast-track research process, a one-week diary-based study with 100 customers asking two questions: "We put that in AI, identify the macro and micro trends and match that against third party market research to come to an insight." He says research and insight-gathering that once took large agencies two months, by applying these techniques, can now be done in as little as three days.

• Campaigns redefined: This new way of working does more than change workflows. It redefines the work itself. Geletka says the industry has to let go of the idea of a single, year-long creative platform and rethink what a campaign even means. "A campaign today might start as 2,000 messages and get broken into 20,000 variations by AI, put into market with 20 images and optimized in real time," he explains, pointing to a model that favors volume, adaptability, and speed over static creative concepts.

In Geletka’s analysis, the shift reflects a deeper structural response to economic uncertainty. As clients prioritize flexibility and faster outcomes, work moves toward shorter, project-based engagements, a dynamic that often plays to the strengths of smaller agencies. While large holding companies still deliver value at scale, he notes that the financial demands built into their operating models make rapid adaptation far more difficult.

• The future is indie: Geletka says the next phase of the agency business favors independent shops that can move quickly and experiment without friction. "The future belongs to the indies and smaller agencies, because they can change faster and give their teams room to explore," he explains. He adds that leaders need to actively encourage that experimentation, saying, "If your team wants to try a new AI tool or builder, you should pay for it, even if it hits your margins in the short term. Open, adaptable teams will always outperform rigid ones over time."

For leaders trying to steer their teams through this chaos, Geletka's advice is to prioritize less slide deck polish, and invest more in a team culture of constant learning of powerful tools like AI. He credits advice from BarkleyOKRP agency owner Tom O'Keefe as a core principle: "Don't spend any money on new business. Just invest in you." The agencies that thrive, he says, will be the ones that give their people the freedom to explore in order to meet changing demand.