Rory Sutherland's Blog

Rory Sutherland

[With photographic credits to turdinabox.com - seriously!]

The most depressing moments?

No, it's not when you lose a pitch. The longer you are in this business, the more phlegmatic you become about this kind of thing.

No, the worst moments in our business always come six months to a year after you lose a pitch.

This is how it happens.

You are invited to solve a problem of some kind for a prospective client. You and a group of other people put a few weeks' unpaid work and quite a few tens of thousands of pounds into coming up with a solution.

And you come up with something which - well, ain't bad.

Maybe it's not a cancer cure, but it will do the job well. The solution includes ads in several media and several disciplines.. You even go beyond the call and explain that there are three or four other things the client can do, perhaps not involving advertising, which might also help solve the problem.

You spend a few thousand pounds more mocking up your proposed work. You argue about whether the headlines should end in a full stop. Whether to write full copy for the third radio script. Whether perhaps you should run another couple of vox-pops featuring the target audience. Or build a replica showroom in the presentation room.

You get up at 6am to rehearse. You are specifically told to bring the real team who will be working on the business because you will need to "hit the ground running". There is clearly no time to lose.

You present. It goes quite well. Although most of the questions come from some entirely unexpected new attendees from the client's sales department who apear to disagree with practically every sentence of the brief you received.

Never mind. Not long now. And you are told you will hear on Thursday week. It needs to be Thursday week because someone is flying over from America on Thursday week and because in clientworld, intriguingly, it's always really important to include as the final arbiter in any agency appointment someone who hasn't seen your presentation at all.

On Thursday week you don't hear a thing. You never hear a f***ing thing on Thursday week. In fact it's rule one of new business - add a week to any date you're told. But it won't be long, you know, because they're "keen to hit the ground running". They said so, didn't they?

Seven weeks later you get a phone call. If you're lucky, this is to tell you that you've lost. If you are unlucky you hear you are "down to the last two". This means you get to spend another 200 unbillable hours at the client's behest while their procurement department gets to treat you as their sex-toy. Before ringing you to tell you you've lost.

Finally they tell you why you've lost. This is never because you are too expensive (that would make them look mean) or because the strategy was wrong (that would look as though you were misbriefed). No, you lose because someone else came up with a "fabulous breakthrough creative route and they just have to work with them".

"Oooh", you think. Well, hats off to the chaps at WGHN or KGHS or whoever. They beat us fair and square. All credit to them. In fact you can't wait to see this breakthrough work. And it can't be long now because you know the client was really "keen to hit the ground running."

Six months pass. Nothing.

Another three months. Not a dickybird.

And then, finally, you see it.

Not the mutimedia integrated campaign you'd been asked to present. Not the breakthrough, blue-water strategy you'd expected....

 No, it's a single ad. It's on a tube card, or perhaps the side of a bus. And it's a total heap of crap. Shameful. Atrocious. In fact all it is a straight call to action but made mildly confusing in the name of creativity.

And that's when you experience one of the worst moments of your working life.

Because four weeks and £50,000 have resulted in an ad any half-competent creative team could have knocked off in an afternoon.

Later in the month you see two more ads the same or even worse. And then you see nothing ever again.

In fairness to the agency that beat you, they may indeed have had a great creative idea. But the odds of it making into the open air were worse than nil. Perhaps it's one of those marvellous Mexican stand-offs beloved of large organisations where the people who can approve advertising don't actually hold a budget - and vice versa.

But, whinge over, this is not a frivolous point. Because if there is one thing which could make advertising (and every other discipline) more efficient, more effective and more creative, it's the one thing we never have the balls to suggest.

The decision-making procedures at perhaps 50% of all client organisations are simply dreadful, and cost them millions by generating pointless and repetitive work to satisfy the demands of internal politics rather than the creation of brand value.

Pizza Hut was recently criticized for renaming a few branches as Pasta Hut. (I don't know why this is such a terrible idea -it seems fairly sensible to me). But one criticism was even more bizarre than most. "It's the sort of idea the Chairman's wife would come up with."

I don't know about you, but working with the Chairman's Wife sounds to me a splendid idea.

In fact outside Utah and the Middle East, the Chairman's wife has the perfect qualification for being a superb client.

There's only one of them.