David Fish: Lessons Learnt From A Failed BMW Pitch

Former advertising strategist, speaker and coach David ‘Fishy’ Fish (lead image), who held senior roles with Initiative and GroupM, has launched his first book, What it Takes to Create Winning Presentations. In this extract, he talks of painful lessons learned from one of his more difficult pitches…

I was Head of Strategy at a London ad agency when BMW approached us to pitch; we didn’t have a car client at the agency, and the CEO wanted one. Car clients look good on your credentials, and often lead to interesting and creative work. And they tend to pay well.

This was a big deal, so there was a lot of pressure. Everyone in the company had a point of view on the pitch and the presentation. Feedback, ideas and slides came from everywhere, every day, right up to the moment we signed in at the reception deck. Even the cleaner had contributed.

The deck grew more enormous and more unwieldy as sections grew, and ideas merged and morphed. Keeping control of this beast was challenging. The laptop complained about saving such a large file. You know you are headed for trouble when there is time for a coffee while the icon spins and the hard drive whirs. At the core of this troubled presentation was a major issue – we had lost sight of the problem we were trying to solve for the client. In fact, I’m not sure we ever fully understood this. As a result, the work was quickly becoming all about us. Not the potential client – us. How wonderfully creative we were, how smart we were (that was my – quite long – section), how much we loved cars (especially BMWs) and how fantastic our process was. Did we mention how good we were?

With five presenters – yes, five, including the company CEO – and over 100 amazing slides (the creative team had excelled in design, videos and animations), we barely mentioned anything that resembled what they wanted, let alone getting down into what they might need from us. Acronyms flowed as we ploughed through the slides, each presenter taking longer than rehearsed as they embellished already irrelevant stories for the increasingly bored client. It became a show about how in love we were with our slides and our ideas. It felt like, at certain moments, we might stop the presentation to slap each other on the back, revelling in how great this deck was and how well we were presenting.

As we powered on obliviously, the clients – a line of them all suited and wearing ties, sitting opposite us across the table – were not sharing our enthusiasm. They fluctuated between agitation, boredom, fear, bewilderment and, at times, outright visible confusion. You know, the face when your pet turns its head to the side as if to say, ‘I have no idea what you want from me’. That is what we were facing. But with no other choice, we continued. How did we get from the Scissor Sisters (an early 2000s pop band) squashed in a Mini with a glitter ball to a BMW motorbike surfing off the coast of Cornwall? Honestly, I wasn’t even sure at that moment, and I wrote the damn presentation. We were so far off course after 30 minutes that as the next 60 ticked by, it started to become painful for us all. We would have been better off packing it in and going for a beer.

As we were shown out by a relieved client and into a very clinical white reception area, where our competitors were waiting, all suited up, our CEO turned and high-fived everyone on the team and yelled out, ‘F***ing way to go, team, smashed it!’ The startled receptionist reached for the security button, and our competitors were left wondering. They had nothing to worry about. This was the cherry on a very soggy cake. We went along with him, but we were all confused. Was he at the same pitch as us? Could he not sense the mood towards the end, that air of ‘when will this finish’?

As he closed the door to his own BMW, he turned to me and the creative director, smiled and said, ‘We’ll never hear from them again.’ A quick squeak of the tyres and BMW was behind us. He was right. We never received a call to ‘officially’ tell us we didn’t win. And we didn’t need one.

EPIPHANY: PRESENTATION SKILLS ALONE ARE NOT ENOUGH

The debrief for this calamity, however, was one of my career’s most productive, constructive and enlightening. We diligently went through each stage, not to find blame (if we wanted to fire those responsible, there wouldn’t be anybody left in the agency) but to extract learnings, lessons and clear action points. We saw this as the best training ground for eventually winning a car client and, within a couple of months, that was the case. When Hyundai briefed us on the launch of the i30, we nailed it: not just a car client but a new car launch for an emerging brand with substantial budgets.

Although we later came out on top, the BMW presentation was a painful experience, and some 20-plus years on I can still vividly recall many details that I would rather not have burned into my memory. Losing is a painful experience, and if you are a competitive person or in any kind of sales role, you are not taking part to come second or for the participation award. Whoever said ‘it’s taking part that matters’ wasn’t in sales.

I was both frustrated and intrigued when we lost, which motivated me to try to better understand what it takes to be a great presenter. But as I learned more about the nuances of pitching strategies, ideas, solutions and content that you need others to take forward on your behalf, this became what it takes to consistently create a winning presentation, a change I had not predicted when I embarked on this work. I can’t tell you how many presentations I have created, curated or sat through and wished I didn’t have to endure or ever see again. But it’s a lot. A lot. With that BMW pitch near the top of the list.

After nearly 30 years of working worldwide in marketing, advertising and media strategy roles, I have seen it all. The outlandishly big ideas, the brand launches and re-launches, the new technology platforms, tender responses, campaign summaries, agency pitches and countless hundreds of media presentations covering every channel you can imagine and a few obscure ones too.

At the heart of all these presentations is a need to get an audience to buy into a strategy, idea or solution by taking them on a journey that connects what you know to what they need. This audience is seeing this content for the first time. So it needs to be delivered in such a way that they can understand it, buy into it, convince others of its benefits and, ultimately, give you the outcome you desire: approve the strategy, buy the idea or sign off on the solution. That is what it means to deliver a presentation that wins over the audience and wins the business over the competition.