The advertising pitch column Pitch Pain launched today on the Agency Post blog. Pitch Pain provides a platform for the advertising industry, clients and search consults to tell their favorite good and bad pitch stories. The goal is to help all of us advance the efficiency of the pitch process while being entertained by our often crazy stories.
Each revealing and occasionally humorous story (just think of the schadenfreude) will be accompanied by a brief review of any home runs or mistakes made plus how-to insights to help us all learn form our dear industry colleague’s experiences.
You can read the first post right here on Agency Post.
Here’s Some Background
I wrote The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. to help advertising, design, digital and PR agencies improve their pitch development processes and, rather importantly, win more business. I got the idea for the book from a December 2013 research study of advertising professionals by Provoke Insights that supports the idea that agency employees are dissatisfied with their agency’s pitch process.
“Approximately half (47% of respondents) of advertising professionals surveyed by Provoke Insights say they are dissatisfied with the current internal approach to pitching.”
Other issues include:
“unrealistic timelines” (66%) and “long work hours” (65%.)
Clearly, trying to craft account winning pitches with disgruntled staff is not a great way to kick off the pitch development process.
In writing the book, I interviewed a range of agency executives, clients, presentation experts and search consultants who have sat through thousands of pitches. Most shared very entertaining pitch experiences. These experiences form the basis of many of the book’s ideas and tips for how to build account-winning small and large agency presentations and pitches.
Pitch Pain And You
My friend Jami Oetting, Agency Post’s Editor, and I quickly realized that we all have our favorite pitch stories. That’s why to air these out and provide industry learning, we teamed up to provide agencies, clients and agency pitch consultants with a platform to tell their own pitch stories.
We want to hear your stories. The good, bad and even ugly. To help, there is a simple form on the website that you can fill out. Form shy? Just send your stories directly to me and i will post them for you. These don’t have to be long. I’m at peter@peterlevitan.com
So, agencies, clients and search consultants… don’t be shy.
Send us your favorite pitch stories. You can name names or exclude some of them if you think anonymity is a wise move.
I didn’t go anonymous in my lead Pitch Pain story about the time that Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising blew a pitch for the global Adidas account by showing videos of bloody baby seals.
Our goals are to entertain and enlighten. Improving the pitch process for all of us is a very good thing.
