Peter Levitan & Co.

The New Business of Advertising

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12 Ad Agency Presentation Mistakes – Why?

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I interviewed Tony Mikes, Founder/Managing Director of the 800 strong agency network Second Wind today (my agency used to be a happy member.) The interview will be one of ten expert interviews that will be included in my book on ad agency pitching. You can see the title I slaved over at the very bottom of this email.

The interview confirmed the sad truth that many agencies are making serious presentation mistakes when they pitch for new business. I already knew this because I’ve talked with many agency owners, agency search consultants, presentation experts and… clients that have sat through mistake ridden presentations. Tony reconfirmed it.

I can’t wait to publish Tony’s insightful comments. They come from firsthand experience when he recently sat on the client side of the table during the RFP and finalist process. The pitch was for the National Aquarium account and the interview with Tony is (pick your word): revealing, sad, unnerving and any other word that you can come up with that describes the lunacy of avoidable agency failure.

Tony hit on the almost all of my twelve ad agency presentation mistakes. Each of these will be discussed at length in the book.

  1. Immediately bore the audience
  2. Don’t have a distinctive message
  3. Don’t have a logical flow
  4. Load up the room with agency people
  5. Bring poor presenters
  6. Don’t deliver any WOW’s
  7. Bring tons of ideas – make many of them irrelevant
  8. Spend too much time talking about YOU not THEM
  9. Don’t rehearse
  10. Misuse PowerPoint
  11. Don’t stage manage
  12. Run out of time

Yikes. As I said, sad but true. By the way, if you search my site for other articles on pitching you will find ones like this: Half of Advertising Agency Staff Hates Pitching. This research was the genesis of my book’s reason for being.

Oh, the title…. The Levitan Pitch: Buy This Book. Win More Pitches.

Now, please sign up for my email newsletter below to make sure that your competitor down the street doesn’t read my book before you read it. I want you to win more pitches, not the other agency.

 

Why I Dig Advertising: Part 1

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The thing that most jazzed me in my advertising agency days was that I got to work with so many different clients and their varied issues. My client categories included:

Land line companies.

Mobile phone companies.

Breakfast cereals.

Yogurt.

New food products.

Snacks.

Restaurants.

Computers.

Email services.

Hosiery (in the days when it was a billion $ industry.)

Sporting goods.

Sports teams.

Ski resorts.

Hotels.

Airlines.

Record companies.

Musicians.

Publishers.

Health care.

Automobiles.

Boats.

Wine. Yes, wine was fun.

OK, I’ll stop. It was this diversity that made me love working in advertising rather than worrying about one brand or product day in and day out like many of our clients do.

Inbound Content Marketing & Ad Agency New Business

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Here is a sweet chart from a study on content marketing from Eloqua. The bottom line… create smart, targeted, strategic content (think blogs, white papers, SlideShare presentations, etc.) that will work as inbound marketing tools and client magnets. Content marketing works for me. That’s how I get my qualified leads. Here is the chart.

www.oracle.com webfolder mediaeloqua documents Content Marketing Kapost Eloqua ebook

Easy Plan

Here is a fast micro plan for how to do it. Of course, the devil is in the details.

  • Go get a blank media / creative brief and write it like you would do for a new client program:
  • Determine who your target audience is. Is it any client with over $1,000,000 to spend? The dentist down the street? The entire automative category?It probably isn’t the art director at the competitive agency so stop writing the 7,000th blog post on responsive design with keywords only a web developer will be interested in.
  • Determine what you want your target audience to do. Like, call you up. Or, join your mailing list.
  • Create a two – three month content plan. Think like an editor. What will  the subjects be that will be of interest to your audience? What are the keywords they use to search for information?
  • Assign someone to mange and at least a couple of people to write the blog.
  • Start with at least 15 blog posts of from 500 to 1,000 words.
  • Keep at it. As the chart shows, it takes a loooong time to get up to speed.
  • Tie the blog automatically to Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+.

Then…kiss your new clients.

 

Ready To Leave Advertising For Silicon?

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If you are ready to leave advertising for what might appear to be greener silicon valley or alley pastures*… Here are some places that might be looking for you and their recruitment tag lines. These lines are actually quite effective (except for Walmart’s which is _____, well, you fill in the blank.)

Take one of the tag lines before getting on New York’s 7 train to battle with your clients.

Hmm. I wouldn’t have thought that these guys would have such good copywriting. But, then again, they can afford good writing.
*Note about greener pastures. My old friend Michael Keeshan used to tell employees that were leaving his agency that “the grass is just as shit brown on the other side of the fence.” Or as my more yoga-style friends like to say: “wherever you go, there you are.” But, Google does have nice buses when its neighbors are not beating them with baseball bats.