Advertising Age published a perspective on pitch decision-makers that opined CMOs are no longer running the review.
The person with the final vote includes Chief Financial Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and/or AI Chief. That’s too many chiefs with not enough Indigenous people, to twist an outdated phrase. Or too many kooks in the kitchen, to twist another phrase.
The author’s closing thought: “The agencies that win the next generation of AOR relationships won’t necessarily have the flashiest creative reel. They’ll be the ones who understood how the buying committee changed and showed up ready to meet every person in that room on their own terms.”
That’s a lot of asses to kiss—an exclusive club of clients to wine, dine, and pine over.
Not a stakeholder with hiring authority: Chief Diversity Officer.
The AOR review has left the CMO’s office
By Robyn Freye
In our last four pitches, the person truly running the room wasn’t a chief marketing officer. That’s new.
Throughout my career, I’ve had a front row seat to hundreds of agency pitches—from the vantage point of an agency leader, holding company chief growth officer and as a search consultant. For years, the participant list looked the same: a brand’s CMO, VPs of marketing, and a procurement lead who showed up at the end to negotiate terms.
As AI accelerates, that list has gotten a lot longer. The C-suite decision tree is rapidly expanding, to the point where marketing leaders are often not even the stakeholders leading the review.
In our pitches, we’ve engaged with chief financial officers asking about ROI and unit economics; chief technology officers asking about data architecture and model access; chief experience officers asking about loyalty and CRM; and increasingly, AI chiefs or center of excellence leaders asking questions no one on the agency side has a slide for. The marketing brief hasn’t disappeared, but it’s no longer the only scorecard agencies are being vetted against.
Tech and finance leaders are increasingly guiding the conversation
We are seeing three things converge at once.
Budgets tightened, and every function attached to spend now answers to finance earlier in the process, not after a recommendation is made. CFOs are piling into budget conversations sooner, rapidly followed by procurement and ops leads.
Agencies used to negotiate with marketing and settle commercial terms with procurement afterward. Now those conversations run in parallel, often before there’s even a brief to respond to.
AI turned the agency relationship into a technical one. Clients aren’t just asking: Can you build the campaign? They’re asking what happens to their data inside an agency’s stack, which models are being used, and who owns the output?
In one recent review, a CTO stopped the pitch mid-presentation to ask exactly where client data goes once it enters our AI workflows. Not as a gotcha, but because it was a genuine gap in what had been disclosed. That’s not a CMO’s question, and it’s not going away as AI gets more embedded into agency work.
Growth and marketing are board-level language now. Accountability for ROI is climbing every rung of the corporate ladder, which means more of the C-suite is getting in the room for the pitch, not reviewing it after the fact.
Agencies must put more skin in the game
Most agencies still build their pitch teams for a CMO audience. But a brilliant strategic idea, delivered by a strategist, a creative and a media lead, doesn’t answer a CFO’s question about cost-to-serve, and it definitely doesn’t answer a CTO’s question about where client data lives once it enters your systems. If those questions get asked and nobody credible in the room can respond, the review stalls right there, no matter how strong the campaign idea is.
This isn’t about padding the pitch team for theater. It’s about building literacy in margin, resourcing models, and ROI methodology, and bringing in technical experts who can speak plainly about security, data governance and how AI is actually being used inside your workflows.
Clients aren’t asking for a bigger show or another slide. They’re asking for someone in the room who can answer their actual business challenges.
The next generation of agency leaders won’t just be strategists and creatives who learned to talk numbers. Pitch teams will become commercially and technically fluent by design, as comfortable defending a margin structure or a data architecture as they are defending a creative concept. Agencies that are still hiring and promoting for one skill set are going to find themselves outnumbered in their own pitch room.
The modern AOR relationship is evolving
The buying committee has changed, and the agency model has to change with it. That’s why independent agencies are punching above their weight to win bigger assignments and credibly competing with holding companies and management consultancies.
They were built to adapt to this moment. When media, data, commerce, and creative sit inside one collective, there’s someone at the table who can actually own the answer when the CFO asks how spend maps to outcomes, or when the CTO asks how the data model works across disciplines. The answer can’t be “let me get back to you.”
There’s a harder version of this problem that nobody in the room is talking about yet: procurement processes move at the speed of contracts, and AI capability moves at the speed of deployment. The agency a brand selects today based on their current AI stack may look materially different in 12 months— tools change, models change, governance practices are still being written. Brands that are serious about this should be building flexibility into AOR agreements, like capability review triggers, structured check-ins tied to AI roadmap updates, and commercial terms that can flex as the relationship evolves.
The agencies that offer that language proactively will stand out. The ones that don’t will find it asked of them anyway.
The real shift isn’t that reviews got more crowded. It’s that the questions being asked have outgrown what a typical pitch team can credibly answer, and clients know it. They’re adding seats at the table because the risk of getting marketing, technology, and cost wrong is now something every member of the C-suite is personally accountable for. When a brand picks the wrong agency, it’s no longer just a marketing problem. It’s a balance sheet problem. It’s a Board conversation.
The agencies that win the next generation of AOR relationships won’t necessarily have the flashiest creative reel. They’ll be the ones who understood how the buying committee changed and showed up ready to meet every person in that room on their own terms.
