The best advice I can give you about pitching is this - brush your tongue as well as your teeth. Because 75% of the microbes which cause bad breath are on the tongue.
And 75% of pitches are about personal chemistry, not about ideas.
I remember when we used to get the intermediaries in to HHCL to talk about pitching. One of them told a very funny story about how a senior female client had said that she fancied “everyone in the room” of the agency which (surprise, surprise) went on to win the pitch.
It was a very funny story for lots of people – but not unfortunately for us, because we’d lost that particular pitch.
Again, I wonder if I’d spent more time in Savile Row and less time in Milletts, how different history might have been.
But as I said last week, if you want sexual chemistry, why not go to a speed-dating event ?
(Although in the case of some people I know, the dating would have to take place at the speed of light for them to pick up any positive responses.)
Pitches should be about ideas.
But don’t just take my word for it. Alex Bogusky is saying the same thing when he says agencies should be factories, rather than thinking they’re in the service industry.
And then, you have to look at one very important question.
Do you present one idea in the pitch, or several ?
Years ago, I remember writing a column where I criticised Saatchis for winning the Toyota pitch by using spectacular pitch theatre.
Basically, they’d somehow managed to get a Toyota into their Reception area, (by removing the glass from their windows, as I understood it) to create an impressive first impression.
I wrote rather huffily that surely strategic thinking was more important than knowing the phone number of a good glazier.
But the fact is that Simon Dicketts had come up with one of the best lines ever created for a pitch – “The car in front is a Toyota” - so it wasn’t empty theatre.
So, that’s one way of going about it – find a great idea and get 100% behind it.
And, if you’re pitching for Anusol, stick a giant arsehole in Reception.
(You’ve probably got one quite near there already.)
But look at the other option.
Because you could show a whole bunch of ideas – as long as all of them are provocative.
And then you could say – let’s make a few of these, and see what happens.
This is where it gets exciting. And this is what I think agencies should be advocating now.
Because creativity has changed fundamentally.
In bad, traditional agencies, 99% of the planning happens before the work breaks.
You get one script that takes 6 months to get through research, and it’s then put out there for a year or more, gathering dust and boring the pants off people.
In good agencies, at least 50% of the planning happens after the work breaks. Because half the skill of it is in developing and evolving it.
It has to be reactive, adaptive.
And that means being less precious about it all.
A very bright planner called Jon Leach who worked at HHCL was once working on a positioning statement for the agency - and he came up with the phrase “Strong opinions, lightly held”.
At the time I thought – that’s b*llocks, we’re about strong opinions, strongly held. But a minute later I thought - no, he’s right.
Rather proving him right, as it happened.
Because the agency loved to explore radical positions for clients, but we’d very rarely die on a sword for anything.
And I think we’d stumbled onto something very valuable about running work.
By being less precious about it, you can maybe create more value.
Present several ideas. Make several ideas. As I pointed out much later to the Whiskas client, there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
And all I care about is that the client does do something radical – rather than the invisible garbage which makes up 95% of our industry’s output.
When we first developed this multiple-idea approach all those years ago, we had to use research to help us pick the best idea out of several.
But that’s far from ideal – because research is tricky.
In fact, research is like sex.
Good research is very good, but bad research is the worst thing in the world.
It’s also like sex in that it involves one-way mirrors, cheap wine, M&S sausage rolls and some bored-looking women wondering if this is really the best use of their evening.
But these days you can push out several ideas and see which one gets talked about most on the internet – thus involving consumers directly and saving yourself the expense of using conventional research.
Because the one thing we know about conventional research is that it doesn’t work.
All new business launches use conventional research, but about 80% of them fail.
(That's worse odds than avoiding halitosis.)
