Respond to a video RFP

What this is about

Video RFPs arrive with a deadline, a requirements list and an evaluation process you can only infer. Before writing a word, the real decision is whether to bid: an RFP without a budget range, with an impossible timeline, or visibly written around an incumbent supplier eats a week of unpaid work with no realistic chance. When you do bid, remember who reads it — often a procurement person scoring against criteria, not a creative admiring your reel. Responses that mirror the tender structure, answer every criterion findably and price against explicit assumptions survive that process; beautiful PDFs that reorganize the questions often do not.

The order matters more than the tools. Skip a step and you usually notice two steps later — by which point the fix costs several times as much.

What runs differently here

In planning terms, that means:

• Unlike a pitch to a known client, an RFP is scored by people you have never met against weights you cannot see.
• The question window is a tool: submitted questions and their shared answers reveal the real priorities of the buyer.
• Assumptions are the quote. Without stated shoot days, revision rounds and usage terms, prices cannot be compared honestly.
• Qualifying out is a legitimate outcome — a no-bid email costs five minutes, a hopeless response costs a week.

Step by step

This order gets you there fastest:

1. Qualify before you write: is a budget range stated or discoverable, is the timeline shootable, who decides, and does the text smell like an incumbent? Three bad answers mean no-bid.
2. Use the question window deliberately. Ask about scope, usage rights and evaluation weights — the answers go to all bidders and sharpen everyone's picture, including yours.
3. Mirror the RFP structure exactly: same section numbers, same order, same terminology. Evaluators score against a grid; make every criterion findable in seconds.
4. Separate the creative response from the commercial one. Ideas get judged on merit and numbers on comparability — mixing the two weakens both.
5. Itemize the assumptions next to the price: shoot days, locations, talent scope, revision rounds, usage terms. State them as the basis of the number.
6. List exclusions explicitly — music licensing, travel, additional versions — so a cheaper-looking rival number can be compared honestly against yours.
7. Show one directly comparable case instead of the whole reel. The evaluator wants evidence you have solved this problem at this scale before.
8. Submit early against the deadline and confirm receipt. Late or lost submissions are disqualified quietly; nobody calls to warn you.

Common pitfalls

What most often goes wrong in practice:

• Delivering finished creative concepts the RFP did not require — free work that gets shopped to the winner.
• Pricing without assumptions, which makes your serious number lose to a stripped-down one.
• Ignoring stated evaluation weights and polishing the section that carries the fewest points.

With TillyGen

TillyGen helps you answer with substance: from the tender's briefing it generates a shotlist and schedule draft, so the scope you price is countable instead of guessed.

Change one constraint and the consequences travel through the whole plan: affected shots are flagged, the call sheet is regenerated, and nobody keeps working from yesterday's version.