Much has been made in recent years about the inefficiencies of the free pitch. But a new app developed by the Amsterdam agency Woedend! aims to clean the process up a little.

Pitcher, AKA “the agency matchmaker,” is a pleasingly simple application for iOS and Android that connects brands looking for pitches with the agencies best equipped to pitch to them. Inspired by the Tinder interface, the app brings up agencies based on the parameters of a given pitch, then lets the client swipe through them and select a list of up to five to get in touch with.

Currently only available to agencies and clients in the Amsterdam area, the idea for Pitcher started as “more of a joke,” says Woedend! creative director Merien Kunst, “but a joke that after a few minutes turned into, ‘what happens if we make this real?’ Instead of complaining about clients’ seemingly superficial way of getting their pitches out, embrace it, and give them the most contemporary, superficial way available.”

According to Kunst, the app is a way of challenging “the lack of transparency in where an agency’s selection really comes from.” As the pitch culture in Holland and the rest of the world has picked up speed, it has become increasingly hard to get a hold on things at the start of the process. “There’s no clear indication of the size of the business you’re pitching for,” he said, “if it’s [just] a project or a complete account.”

Additionally, Kunst continued, “pitching is occasionally abused to get ideas for cheap.”

Part of the problem – if not the main problem – is that agencies can blur together in a client’s mind. With most agencies offering a slew of different services, it can be hard for a client to tell what each agency’s specialty is, so the client invites many agencies to pitch, even if several of them might not be right for the job at hand. Pitcher helps eliminate that inefficiency by quickly and only showing the agencies that best fit the client’s pitch parameters, which include fields such as “Brand Category” and “Campaign Type.”

Agencies available on the app are supplied and curated by the Amsterdam Ad Blog, not Woedend!, and indeed, Kunst is quick to point out that his agency doesn’t appear at the top of every search in the app, but gets matched based on the same formula as everyone else. Sure, part of the goal in actually bringing this idea to fruition was “being visible,” he said, but Pitcher was also a way for Woedend! to “actively pursue business by facilitating tools for the people who are paying for the work we do… There aren’t too many tools or services that get offered TO the people that are paying the agencies, BY the agencies.”

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