A pitch briefing is an ordinary briefing plus four chapters about the procedure. Those four get forgotten most often and cause the most argument afterwards.
First the substance
The situation with numbers, the goal, the audience, your positioning, what is fixed and what is free, and how you will know it worked. See how to write a good briefing.
Then the four procedure chapters
1. The budget. Give the amount or the range. Leaving it out feels like preserving negotiating room and produces three proposals at three different scales that you cannot line up. You lose comparability, not money.
2. The criteria with their weights. Which five axes, and how much each counts. That forces you to decide in advance what matters, and it tells the agencies where to put their time.
3. Who decides, and how it runs. Names or at least roles, the number of rounds, the dates, and when you will respond. An agency that knows eight people will be in the room builds a different proposal than one expecting two.
4. What happens to the work. Who holds the rights to what is shown, whether there is a fee, and what happens to the proposals not chosen. This is the chapter that saves you a conflict later. See may I use the work from a pitch.
Three practical rules
- One document, one question round, answers to everyone at once. Answering one agency separately gives it a head start you cannot subtract later.
- Say how many agencies are taking part. It determines how much they invest, and it is a normal question.
- Put in what you do not want to see. Five channels in a proposal when you wanted two costs everyone time.
The check beforehand
Read the briefing yourself and ask whether you could answer it without knowing the company from the inside. If not, information is missing, and the agency that guessed best will win.
The substance half can be checked for free with IKAg's briefing analysis, which walks a briefing through these points.
See also: how to judge pitch presentations fairly.