The client side says...
You cannot protect IP during the pitch process. Period. Get over it. Your agency gets the RFP, decides to pitch and believes it has come up with that one thing the client has never thought of. I spent 10 years as a creative and still even I am amazed at the paranoid delusions on the agency side of the client "stealing" their idea. Do you really think you are so creative that it trumps years of experience with the brand on the client side? That your three weeks with the brand, two all-nighters and one strategy session will have provided you with that nirvanic moment of Zen that allows you to see the client's brand so clearly? Wow, you really are drinking the delusional Kool-Aid of advertising: your own.
I understand. I was convinced that several clients had stolen RFP pitch work after I had seen almost identical executions months later, but that was before I spent the last half decade client-side.
The client stealing your idea is about as likely as you sleeping with someone not in the ad business. I just sat through a pitch with five agencies. Many ideas were similar, and two were almost identical. In fact, if we execute that idea, I guarantee you one agency will be convinced that we stole it from them. Why does so much work look the same in the pitch? The "brief." You are all ideating off the same document. Where you end up is often quite similar.
Don't worry; it is not the ideas that are brilliant, it is the execution of those ideas that bring brilliance into reality. Without that, without you, without your understanding of all of the subtle nuances of the campaign you just presented, even if the client does take aspects of the idea, it will probably be the worse for it. It's in the execution that the value lies. It is in your people.
Agencies don't always fully appreciate what business they are in. If their "ideas" are so valuable then why do they bill clients by the hour instead of by the idea? "Time" is your compensation model, so stop acting like it's your ideas that we are paying for. In the pitch, you're doing volunteer work.
Look, it's your choice; you do not have to participate in the pitch. You really don't. And if your ideas are what you value, then charge for them, and reward your people based on that model. Otherwise, shut up already with your they stole my idea.