How do you use consumer behaviour to win an agency pitch? By turning up with evidence, not opinion. The agency that shows what the category's audience is saying, what the client's competitors are publishing and where nobody is talking at all stands out from the pack. And that is exactly what Brazil's new pitch recommendations now reward.
On Tuesday 13 October, Abracom (the Brazilian association of communications agencies) and ABA (the Brazilian advertisers' association) presented the updated version of their Guide to Purchasing Corporate Communications Services, first launched in 2023. According to Meio & Mensagem, Brazil's leading marketing trade title, the document gains 10 practical steps, guidance on the use of AI and a recommended payment term of up to 60 days. The line every agency should hear comes from Carina Almeida, Abracom's director of data and market benchmarks: hiring "cannot be reduced to an automated comparison of prices and deliverables".
Translated into everyday terms: if your proposal looks like the other three, it will be compared on price. The way out is to bring something into the room that no procurement spreadsheet can compare: understanding.
What changes in agency pitches with the updated guide?
The guide was written for buying corporate communications, but the message applies to any independent agency pitching against bigger outfits. Several of the 10 steps directly change how you should prepare:
| Guide step | What it asks for | How to respond with evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Brief and challenges | More detailed briefs and proposal scopes | Rewrite the challenge in the consumer's own words, taken from real conversations |
| Transparency and evaluation | Selection criteria and methodology shared with the agencies | Show the whole chain: data, tension, insight, idea |
| Portfolio, cases and capabilities | Assessing whether the agency builds technology into its processes | Show how you track the client's category, not just your list of tools |
| Budget and pitch process | Client discloses the investment; agency confirms the budget before taking part | Size the proposal effort to the declared budget |
| Detailed feedback for every participant | Individual feedback on each agency's performance | Use the feedback to calibrate your next dossier |
On AI, the guide acknowledges that generative AI is already used in briefs, in organising pitches, in analysing proposals and in tracking results. But it treats the technology as a tool that improves the process, not one that removes the need for human interaction. Carina Almeida sums it up: these are "predominantly intellectual and relational services".
Why has consumer behaviour become a pitch argument?
Because transparent criteria favour those who can prove their case. When the client discloses how it will judge, the presentation stops being a talent show and becomes a test of reasoning. And reasoning without data is just opinion with a nice layout.
Expectation confirmation theory helps explain the mechanism. Someone's satisfaction depends on the gap between what they expected and what they got. Every agency promises to "understand the consumer", so the client walks into the room already expecting it. The agency that shows real conversations, named tensions and competitors' ads side by side doesn't just confirm that expectation: it exceeds it. The agency that merely asserts it disappoints without even realising.
The theory has a second half that few agencies consider. The expectation set during the pitch becomes the yardstick for the first months of the account. Promising on gut feel is signing up for a disappointment next quarter.
Which consumer behaviour trends should you take into the room?
Forget the generic "trends for 2027" deck. The committee will probably see that slide in other presentations the same week. What counts is the trend in the client's own category, with chapter and verse.
Imagine a 25-person independent agency pitching for a supplements brand. Instead of "consumers are looking for wellbeing", it arrives with three findings: the question that comes up most in competitors' comments, the promise every ad repeats and the complaint nobody answers. Each finding comes with real posts attached. The conversation shifts from "we like the idea" to "how did you find that out?"
Signals worth looking for:
- Recurring tensions: the conflict the audience expresses in its own words.
- Shifts in language: terms, comparisons and references the audience has started to use.
- Patterns in competitors' ads: offers, messages and formats everybody repeats.
- White space: questions the audience asks that no brand answers.
How to build a category dossier before the pitch
- Confirm the budget before you start. The guide itself recommends it. A good dossier costs senior hours; don't spend them on a pitch with no declared investment.
- Map the whole category. Direct and indirect competitors, plus the creators who set the agenda in the conversation. The client doesn't only compete with the names in the brief.
- Read competitors' ads and organic content. List messages, offers and formats. Look for what everyone says in the same way.
- Listen to the audience's conversations. Comments, questions, complaints. Group them into personas and tensions, not age brackets.
- Separate pattern from anecdote. Every conclusion must point to the posts that support it. If it doesn't, it comes out of the deck.
- Tie each finding to the brief. Three well-connected opportunities beat twenty curiosities.
- Open up your methodology. The guide asks the client for transparency. Return the favour by showing where each conclusion comes from.
Where AI helps, and where the guide wants people
The competitor audit is one of the most laborious jobs in any pitch: opening profile after profile, screenshotting ads, building spreadsheets, summarising. Days of work that end up as two slides. It's exactly the kind of task AI should take off the table.
Defy Monitor does that groundwork live: competitor, audience and conversation intelligence across every client and category the agency works in, with every conclusion linked to the real posts behind it. On the Defy platform, you can analyse a whole category's ads in one go and automatically cluster audience conversations into personas and tensions.
What AI doesn't do is choose which tension deserves a campaign, or hold the client's gaze in the presentation. The guide is clear about that, and rightly so. The machine builds the dossier; the planners decide what it means.
What does the 60-day payment term have to do with your preparation?
More than you might think. According to Meio & Mensagem, Carina Almeida argues that long payment terms shift the financing of the client's operations onto the agency, squeeze working capital and the capacity to invest, and put smaller agencies at a disadvantage in pitches.
The same logic applies to pitch effort. An independent agency doesn't have the cash to burn weeks of senior time on every pitch. When the category groundwork takes hours rather than weeks, there's energy left for what actually decides the account: the idea, the strategy and the chemistry with the client.
For Almeida, the market is moving away from cost-centred procurement towards a broader assessment of the value communication creates. That's good news for anyone who can demonstrate value before being hired. And bad news for anyone still relying solely on a pretty PowerPoint.
