Belgium's Agencies on Strike (Kinda)

In an interesting twist, Ad Age reports that Belgium's creative shops have taken down their websites in protest at client-side marketers ignoring 'pitch rules' negotiated by the industry some time ago.

Spiralling pitch costs are point of industry debate globally, and following talks a charter was penned containing 'rules of engagement' to make the process fairer, including things like clients inviting no more than 3 agencies to pitch for work, and contributing to pitch costs where reasonable.

Its sounds like things haven't panned out as expected, and agencies have taken the unusual step of taking down their sites and replacing them with a linked open letter that takes people on a journey from one site to the other to read the whole thing. You can start it at Famous, and continue from there, or if you're short of time, I've posted screen grabs below. Interesting stuff, and no doubt going to get tongues wagging around the world - what do you think?