I have always loved pitching.
I love the drama, the nervousness, the tension, the creativity.
I also love that it’s a chance to reinvent how the agency is seen every single time.
Because of this, I’ve always embraced using a pitch to try new ways to present your work.
I’ve done a lot of stuff over the years.
Some has – without doubt – been an unmittigated disaster, but far more often, it’s been successful.
Not because we’ve used gimmicks or theatre, but we’ve found an interesting way to get our point across without [hopefully] repeating what every other agency they’ve seen has said.
Some of my favourites have been when we won the launch of Disneyland Shanghai when we were the 18th agency to pitch and I had inadvertently insulted the head of procurement when I accidentally wrote ‘retards’ instead of ‘regards’.
Mind you, they got their own back when they fired us after 2 years – and just before some truly amazing work was going to be made.
Then there was the time we won the SONY global business based on a photo I’d taken of a sign they had in their HQ.
It was an arrow pointing to the right to show you where reception was … and I used that as the basis for our pitch which basically said SONY spent so much time looking at what their competitors were doing, they’ve forgotten the need to forge their own path.
And then there was our winning pitch to Virgin when they were going to start their F1 team.
The reality was they were unlikely to ever win a race – or maybe even a point – given the gulf in investment and technology between them and their competitors.
So our strategy was to model themselves on tennis player Anna Kournikova … because even though she never won a grand slam, she was one of the most recognised, supported and wealthy tennis players in the tournaments.
That was fun.
But recently I found a photo that reminded me of a time we were pitching for BEATS by Dre.
I was at Wieden Shanghai and we had a meeting to talk about the China market.
Instead of a presentation about culture or music or fashion, I had one slide that said, “If You Don’t Define Who You Are, Someone Else Will’ and then I gave them all a set of the fake headphones that are the photo at the top of this post.
And we won.
Some say what we did was ballsy … but it wasn’t really.
When you realise the client is going to be sitting through a bunch of meetings that often say the same thing – or worse, just talk about the agency rather than the client – you realise having a strong POV that can form the foundation for work that will resonate with culture is the most sensible thing you can do.
Of course it takes just as long to come up with that as it does writing the 1000 page decks of boredom, but when it comes to delivery … it not only helps you stand out, it helps ensure they remember your point of view rather than get confused with countless pitches that talk a lot but say nothing.