A few years ago we pitched for the Goodyear business and we dressed the agency foyer, boardroom and hallway as a mechanics workshop with oil all over the floor, spare tyres, girlie posters, rags. It looked like shit. We had people in from a theatre company to dress it up and it looked really, really awful. The clients, when they came in for the presentation, had to walk through things and over things into the boardroom. It was a high-risk strategy but we found out later from the client that we could have even almost not have even done the presentation, we’d won it on the way through. The point we were making was the experience customers go through was a really shitty experience. We were unashamedly inspired by a famous British Rail pitch in the UK where the agency kept three be-suited gentlemen waiting and waiting and waiting, in the foyer which had garbage and blowing newspapers around. The men were getting really pissed off and just as they were about to leave they grabbed them and made the point that this was what British Rail customers had to put up with every day. From a client’s perspective, substance will always override style. You can have all the best theatrics but if what the agency’s got to say doesn’t stack up they’re not going to be impressed. Finding the balance between the theatre and getting a really powerful presentation across is the ultimate challenge. If you’re too heavy on the theatre and not enough oomph it’s going to fall flat. Or if it’s filled with details but it’s very dry you haven’t sold them either.
Colin Sevitt
Creative director, Bush Atkins
Once, as part of the Bush Atkins pitch for the NSW Government safe sex campaign, we created a character called ‘Condom Cowboy’. Condom Cowboy was a flamboyant-looking bloke with exposed butt cheeks and bullet belts stuffed with condoms. We proposed that Condon Cowboy would cruise around Oxford Street on a Saturday night, popping in and out of dance clubs and giving away free condoms along the way. On the pitch day, we had planned to have an actor burst into the presentation dressed up as Condom Cowboy, prance around for a few minutes leaving a trail of condoms in his wake. Unfortunately, number restrictions for the presentation prevented us from having Condom Cowboy appear in the flesh so we sufficed with a life-sized mock-up. It was worth it to see the non-reacting faces of the 10 stakeholders. Bush Atkins made it onto the shortlist of 6, which wasn’t too bad considering 50 agencies responded to the tender. We failed to make it through to the next round. Maybe a live Condom Cowboy would’ve helped! Damian Linklater, one of our senior writers, worked as a creative director in Kenya where, according to him, some pretty dodgy things went on during pitches. He told me about an agency that promised the potential client a week away on a tropical island with a famous Kenyan jazz singer if he awarded them the business. In return, the singer was promised she would get to sing the music track for the campaign. I personally haven’t had any humiliating moments during a pitch presentation, however I do remember an occasion when one of my colleagues here at Bush Atkins decided to commit a totally random act of silliness in the middle of an important new business meeting and fell backwards off his chair. I felt his embarrassment even though I was desperately trying not to burst out laughing! I think in a pitch you have to get noticed and remembered for the right reason, which is cracking a groundbreaking idea that’s going to help a potential client solve a business problem.
Tim Castree
Managing director, Leo Burnett, Sydney
When I was head of account management at BBH in New York we were pitching against Wieden & Kennedy for Starbucks. They were very interested in getting a West Coast agency so we were a bit of wide shot because they were talking to Wieden who were on their doorstep and saw us as an out-of-touch New York agency. So to demonstrate to them that we really connected with the heartland of America and the heartland of Starbucks coffee drinkers we rented a motor home and for the nine days before the actual pitch drove from New York to Seattle which was 3,000 miles across the country, stopping at every single Starbucks along the way, making a documentary of our journey into Starbucks’ heartland. There were five of us, me, an account director, a planning director, a cameraman and a junior suit. Although we embarked on the trip with much enthusiasm somewhere around Omaha we were getting pretty pissed off with each other. We spent two hours in every Starbucks and asked the same questions and at some point were getting the same answers. I felt like I was in that Bert Reynolds film Cannonball Run. We were pitching 10am and we arrived in Seattle the night before the pitch with all of our film forage and edited our video through the night, finishing at 9am. And at 10.30am we presented right after W&K. Howard Schultz, the head of Starbucks was blown away by the effort. The video we made was hysterical and funny and it was really quite the documentary, we thought we might have careers outside of advertising after that. But, we went home and then about four days later found out they picked W&K. Suffice to say, we were somewhat crushed. But it went down in BBH lore as one of the most ambitious pitch stunts ever. Now, with the growing role of pitch consultants they will dictate the nature of the response and the style in some ways. I quite like working with them as it forces you to get down to the business issues at hand which is so much more worthwhile spending your time on than how are you going to dress up the foyer. That said, in instances where it’s not been run that way we’ll also sit down and decide: What is the kind of pitch theatre we want to use? What are our hooks? Does that have any implications for how we dress the room? The response times are so tight you have to spend the majority of your time thinking about the problem and coming up with the work and the solution which means you don’t necessarily have the luxury of weeks and weeks to think about the stunts.
Steve Lennon
MD, Imagination Australia
At Imagination we have a reputation for coming up with outrageous ideas. Once, as part of a product launch for Lexus, we put a Lexus car on a floating stage in the pool at Bondi Icebergs. We then covered the car in a modular iceberg so that when people arrived all they saw was a massive lit-up iceberg. During the night, actors used picks to hack at the iceberg, which cracked to reveal the car. It was this idea that won us the business. It took months of negotiating with the council to get permission to deliver on this idea but we were persistent and the client was pleased with the result. There is a lot of competition in this industry and the bar keeps getting lifted on us all the time and it makes you wonder where we can go to next. We find our past work sets a benchmark for us to keep pushing past in terms of creativity. Humiliating moments in pitches happen from time to time. We experienced a calendar driven error once when we turned up a day late to present to a client. It was taken in good humour, but I do believe it counted against us because we didn’t win the business. Sometimes a pitch can happen too quickly and you find out that you and your client are actually talking a different language. Whatever was in words is different to what they had in mind and you have to work around that.
Jack Singleton
Director, Jack Watts Currie
The most outrageous thing we've done to win business? Nothing. Well, nothing of our own. We were asked for full creative but instead just turned up with 20 or 30 ads from the same category and told the potential client we had no idea what we were going to do for them. We simply showed them what we wouldn't do. And yes, we got the business. We knew the client knew very little about how the market perceived them and they were going to spend the equivalent of a medium-size country's GDP on research to find out. Every time an ad is presented and is taken by the client as a joke [it’s humiliating]. This happens most pitches. I still don't know what was so funny about our line for San Miguel: ‘Clean beer from a dirty country’. You can do all the stunts in the world to get noticed but, in the end, the agency with the best thinking and the best people will always win the business. Unless, of course, the client is a fool—which from my experience is never the case.
Brad Hellegas
CEO, The Marketing Zoo
The most outrageous thing we’ve done to win a piece of business is have four people travel 10,000 miles for a one hour presentation that we weren’t sure we actually even wanted to win. But it was worth it, it is always worth it. We did not win that piece of business but it lay the foundation for us to win many subsequent pieces of business with that client over the next couple of years. Most humiliating experience? Many years ago, in a previous position, I put up a slide in front of the entire marketing department (about 20 people) with the wrong client’s name on it, unfortunately it was their competitors (long story). The marketing community is small and we currently do work with some of the people that were in that meeting and they are kind enough to remind me of this from time to time. I think the bar, in terms of pitching, is constantly being raised, which is a good thing. To summarise Charles Darwin: adapt or become extinct.
