Been buried in dual rfp/pitch mode recently, and am only just now coming up for air. They leave that part out in art school by the way: Before you get to make pretty pictures for the client? You need to convince them to give you a shitload of money first. A new biz pitch almost always means two things:
1) All hands on deck and 2) The agency isn’t getting paid for it.
It’s still a shot at new business however, no matter what the odds of winning it. A chance to show not just your capabilities, but also a chance to educate a client on what it is they don’t know they don’t know.
Believe: When it comes to social networks/media, at some point the latter will rear its ugly head. The stuff you live with every day, the stuff you took for granted in a late-nite pizza and Mt. Dew fueled haze, is absolutely, likely, possibly brand spankin’ new to the client—and possibly a few people in your agency too.
You need to dumb it down for them, but this isn’t a bad thing. Out of that comes a better understanding of what it is you’re trying to say in that 159-page Powerpoint, and how you can and should distill it down for other audiences.
(Presentation decks are another topic. Account people and clients need the reassurance of a shitload of data—creatives just want a simple, one-line thought and visual. See? Consensus!)
You also get to look at what the brand and their competitors are doing. Always fun. Some of it’s cool, other stuff makes you cringe, just because you know what you’d do different. But then you hear things that come back from the client that make you slapahead:
“We’ll do a Twitter!”
Which goes back to, Jules needs to go back in there, chill them clients out and wait for The Wolf, who should be comin’ directly. Clients that haven’t played around too much with social media can just about grasp what each thing, tactic, place, etc., does, let alone see the bigger picture of how those things support their current marketing efforts.
So much of what we find lately is that we’re talking to clients about what not to do as much as anything. The focus on tactics rather than focusing on whether or not the space is right for them to even be in is alive and well. Best you can do is hope to educate them and point out the how and why. If they believe in the message, then they give you lots of money to go play.
I love pitches.
1 comment:
Like you, Bill, I, too, love to pitch, even though the pitches seem to be getting a little more like searches for the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. For me, it's another opportunity to try to figure out how all this STUFF really works -- something that's changing every day in ways that many clients have trouble accepting. But I disagree with you about one thing: Thankfully, parts of life are not pitches. I also like not pitching.
Post a Comment