“Stop Asking for Pitches: 10 Declarations to Fix the Client-Agency Relationship” is a book by Camden Bernatz that lays out a practical framework for repairing one of advertising's most persistently broken dynamics: the agency pitch. Rather than treating pitches as an unavoidable cost of doing business, the book argues for a more honest, sustainable model of partnership between clients and the agencies they hire — one built on trust and shared incentives instead of free work and competitive theater.
The cover draws on chess imagery to capture something true about how client-agency relationships often feel from the inside: strategic, guarded, and more than a little adversarial — two sides maneuvering for position rather than working toward a shared outcome. Pieces move in fixed, calculated patterns, and one side typically only wins when the other loses. That's exactly the dynamic the book pushes back against, so the design leans into the metaphor rather than away from it, using the chessboard's order and tension as a visual shorthand for the very problem the ten rules are trying to solve.
