Search Results for: pitch

The Levitan Pitch.

Buy This Book. Win More Advertising Pitches.

The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. is the definitive how-to guide for every advertising, design, digital and PR agency that wants to increase its odds of winning new accounts.

Based on 30 years of pitching for new accounts from Oshkosh to Seoul, I know that there is no such thing as a standard marketing services pitch or presentation scenario. Every client category, size, assignment, timetable, budget, search consultant, procurement system, and client personality is unique.

However… While there is no standard pitch or agency, there are universal pitch criteria and presentation techniques that can be identified and addressed regardless of the type or size of client, specific marketing objectives, or agency. To that extent, The Levitan Pitch. is designed to deliver one master benefit: You will win more new clients.

Buy The Paperback and eBook On Amazon Now By Clicking Here.

Kudos:

“I possibly have read every book about agency pitches and none come close to the rich, detailed information and guidance that you will find in this book. It lives up to its title. I highly recommend that every advertising, digital, media and PR agency principal read it.

I have to admit, IT IS the most complete ‘how-to-book’ on ad agency pitches I’ve ever read. If there was a class on how to pitch the right way, this should be the required text book.”

Michael Gass, Fuel Lines

“If you’re in the agency business, you know the new business development and pitching grind like no other. As we all know, pitching for new business is the lifeblood of any marketing agency. Winning the pitches… no matter how great of a closing record you may have, is such a strange thing.

Peter Levitan thinks he knows how to make it happen. After reading his book, The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches., I believe him. He’s an industry veteran who has pitched and won all kinds of major accounts for major agencies, and he’s currently writing and training the next generation of agencies. If you’re trying to figure out how to win more business (and who isn’t?), this show is just for you.”

Mitch Joel, 6 Pixels of Separation, CEO Mirum Canada

An Interview About The Levitan Pitch…

I Was Fired – A Lot – A ‘Happy Ending’ Story

Peter · February 12, 2026 ·

“You’re… Fired”: My Life Story

I was fired five times. Five. Good news, each “you’re fired” led to personal success.

Before I get into my personal story, I want to make it clear that my definition of being fired is not necessarily the usual one. Traditionally, being fired means that you’ve been axed, sacked, canned, let go, terminated, or dismissed. In most cases, people get fired for poor performance, misconduct, breaking company rules, or other issues related to their work or behavior (plus the lovely phrase: downsized often due to a corporate reorganization).

To be very au current, given today’s evolving work universe, someone might have been AI’d. To be more direct, let’s just call it what it is… many careers are about to be brutally fucked by Artificial Intelligence. Not yet rampant. Stay tuned, as some bigly disruption is coming fast.

My firings were never due to poor performance (well, my Adidas case might be an exception). Stay tuned for that intriguing story.

Firing has gone in two directions. In my management career, I unfortunately had to fire people. In every case, letting someone go was extremely painful and upsetting for everyone involved.

Because the act was so painful for me, I have been fascinated (and repulsed) that the term “You’re fired” became part of our vernacular and was even applauded by fans of Donald Trump’s TV show The Apprentice.

This humiliating public dismissal became a bedrock vibe that helped elevate Trump’s popularity and belief in his business acumen. It proved to the unwashed just what a great businessman he has been. Americans have an interesting take on what makes a boss great. They also seem to love Trump’s use of gold…. Everywhere.

1. Fired Number One: Northwest.

I started my advertising career in 1980 at Dancer Fitzgerald Sample, New York’s largest advertising agency. We had multiple floors in the iconic Chrysler Building. DFS’s clients included major brands like Toyota, P&G, General Mills, RJR Nabisco, HP, and Wendy’s.

Not a bad place to launch a career. The 1980s advertising world rocked. My own clients included General Mills (cereals and Yoplait Yogurt), Sara Lee, and Western Union (yes, Western Union, its EasyLink service, get this, was the first commercial email app). Since the term email had yet to exist, as brilliant marketers, we called the benefit “Instant Mail.”

In my third year at DFS, I was asked to run the Minneapolis-based Northwest Airlines account. At the time, the third largest U.S. airline. Not just run the account; I was asked to move to Minneapolis and become the GM of our new office dedicated to this $60,000,000 advertising account. It was a rather good career move as it allowed me to move past my tier of account execs.

DFS inherited the business because our client, Republic Airlines, had been purchased by Northwest, and, well, good news, Northwest liked our style vs. Republic’s existing advertising agency.

Northwest bought Republic to build out its domestic routes. At that time, Northwest, then known as Northwest Orient Airways, was best known for its international service, particularly its leadership in North America-Asia routes. The airline’s “Great Circle Route,” developed in the 1930s, carried more flights to Asia than any other airline.

Back in the 1980s, Northwest was not considered a quality product. The planes were old. The seats were worn. The in-flight service kinda sucked.

To get ahead of the airline’s service failures, we brought in innovative marketing. We launched the most lucrative frequent flier program. We gave away more miles and therefore trips than any other airline. The airline’s largess worked at a time when domestic and global business travel was starting to boom. Good timing.

On the positive side, Northwest was the U.S. to Asia leader in terms of the number of westbound flights. The airline flew to China, Guam, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand. Unfortunately, the international product was uncompetitive and increasingly at risk due to superior service from leading Asian carriers. Northwest was like a Volkswagen compared to a Ferrari. The airline’s dominance was also at risk from United Airlines, which was introducing new Asia routes.

To save the international business, we turned to what I called ‘information as a service’. An uncommon brand attribute in the 1980s.

Our Asia Series was designed to help newbie American businesspeople learn how to conduct business across unfamiliar Asian cultures. Examples: we taught Americans how and when to bow in Japan, how to deliver the right gifts in China, and how to survive a karaoke night in Seoul. These business tips were delivered via a series of TV commercials, 90-second radio infomercials, booklets, and even 900 numbers (yes, those were mostly porn in those days).

The Asia Series was so successful that we won a bunch of creative accolades and prestigious EFFIE Awards for the client and agency. EFFIEs were awarded by the American Marketing Association in recognition of marketing excellence and proven results.

Back to getting fired. [Read more…] about I Was Fired – A Lot – A ‘Happy Ending’ Story

How To Lie: From TV to LinkedIn

Peter · October 19, 2025 ·

To Tell the Truth — Even Better… How To Lie

_____________________________________________________________

The Set Up

What you are about to read is a mélange of life experiences. These include growing up in Manhattan, getting loaded in Puerto Vallarta, being an LSD expert, killing it on a TV show, a bit of HDHD, getting tossed out of college, finding “art,” and getting banned from LinkedIn.

Chapter 1

To tell you my very own truth, I’m a skilled liar. Not psychotic. Just good at factoid manipulation.

I can prove it. Stay tuned.

I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, across the street from Central Park. When people I meet ask me where I’m from… I say Manhattan. After a few minutes of conversation, they say, “Oh, yeah, I get it.”

I went to McBurney School, a private high school in New York City. It was small – we had 61 students in our senior class. We wore blue blazers with McBurney emblems, gray wool pants, and striped ties. The school was on 63rd Street, sandwiched between Central Park and Lincoln Center. We had what I’d call a classical education. Despite being a smart guy in a smart school, I was not remotely interested in most of my classes, especially math. I was one of those kids who did not meet their “potential”. Frankly, school bored me. But I hung in.

One sunny fall afternoon, I was going to hang out with my good friend Jeff. After classes, he showed up in the school lobby to tell me that he couldn’t do the hangout because our headmaster had asked him to join a couple of other boys, uber math and science lovers, to go down to the TV production company Goodson-Todman Productions. Goodson-Todman was the leading game show company and ran hugely popular TV shows like Family Feud, The Price Is Right, and Concentration. Their office was on a high floor in Park Avenue’s iconic ultra-modern Seagram’s Building.

My classmates were going to audition for two guest slots on the popular afternoon panel show To Tell the Truth. I tagged along… the plan was to run around the city after they finished their audition.

Just in case you are not a baby boomer, To Tell the Truth was a staple of daytime TV from 1956 to 1978. The show was a fun game show where celebrity panelists tried to figure out which of three contestants was telling the truth about having a weird job or crazy experience. The other two were impostors who got to lie through their teeth.

Back to me. Here we are, three blazer-clad high school boys in the Seagram building on Park Avenue, sitting in a very snazzy reception area. Within a few minutes, a young production assistant came out and welcomed us. She asked if we were the boys from McBurney. My buddies stood up, and the woman asked why I was sitting. I told her that I was there as a friend. She said, hey, why not get interviewed too – you are already here. My buddies looked at me with surprise. I’m like, why the hell not?

The assistant took me into a small conference room and started with questions to get to know me. I happily told her that I truly loved math and science (LOL), and I demonstrated that I could put sentences together. Plus, I was telegenic with a workable and effective blush.

It was then that I found out that we were being interviewed for a To Tell The Truth episode about LSD, a drug just then making the rounds of my generation. One of us was going to be one of two non-truth impostor boys sitting beside a Midwest teenager who had won the National Science Award for reporting the effects of LSD on spiders – a 1948 experiment he had recently updated.

I’m like, LSD and arachnids. That’s cool… fits neatly into the zeitgeist. This was 1968, hippies were all over the TV news, and I had read a bit about two newly famous Harvard professors who had experimented with LSD and were becoming 1960s cultural icons.

A day after the interview, our headmaster asked me to come to his office, a rare event, and asked what the heck I was doing at the production company because he was rather surprised to hear that I had been selected to be on the show. I just smiled and shrugged.

I had a couple of phone conversations with the production assistant and was given a date for the show and a bit more detail on the science project. Guess what! The spiders wove crazy webs under the influence of LSD. Who knew?

An LSD Education…

I had two compelling incentives to be a brilliant faker on To Tell the Truth. One was simply my competitive nature. Like, why couldn’t I look and sound the part of a science nerd? This would sort of be my first “business pitch”. Pitching was something I would eventually master and write business books about. The other incentive was the cash prize for being believed that I was the real LSD science nerd.

Back to EDU.

After being selected, I went to the Donnell Research Library on West 53^rd Street to study all about psychedelics and especially Lysergic Acid Diethylamide. My acid gurus were Harvard’s Timothy Leary, who became well-known for his mantra, “Turn on, tune in, drop out”, and Richard Alpert. Richard eventually became the global Buddhist guru Baba Ram Dass, now famous for his mantra, “Be Here Now.” Leary and Alpert were moral evangelists, even entrepreneurs in the emerging field of psychedelics that captured the attention of the post-war cohort. They had been so good at their job that they were kicked out of Harvard. My goal was to become an expert like them. FYI: Dozens of years later, I got “Be Here Now” tattooed on my right arm to help tame my monkey mind.

The Show.

A couple of weeks later, I found myself in Studio 54, yes, that one, for the tapping of the show. I was one of three teens facing Tom Poston, Peggy Cass, Orson Bean, and Kitty Carlisle (famous people in 1968), plus the host, Bud Collier. The goal for the imposter boys was to stump the panel plus the audience, who also voted. Our maximum prize was $500, which would be shared.

What happened? [Read more…] about How To Lie: From TV to LinkedIn

The Big Advertising Agency Resource List

Peter · June 6, 2024 · 40 Comments

Advertising Agency Resource List – Updated Often

The advertising agency resource was recently updated with three new AI information tools. I use them.

My Advertising Agency Resource List is often curated to help advertising, digital, design, and PR agencies easily find the inspiration and industry resources to help you build killer agencies and careers.

FYI: According to Google, people spend mucho minutes perusing this long list.

If I were you, I’d grab a glass of Larkmead Cabernet Sauvignon 2016 (LOL only $150 or a nice craft beer – a bit less expensive) and check out all of these links. I guarantee that at least one of these websites and/or tools will help you or your team grow your agency.

A kudo from David Ogilvy: “I wish I had this advertising resource list when I was in the ad biz. All I had was my brain.”

OK, one more. Go here: Corleone offer.

New Resources.

AI Related… Websites + A Podcast Just For Marketers + YouTube

Marketing Intelligence Institute: From Paul Roetzer (super smart marketer for eons) on how to use AI in marketing and advertising. Read it, attend their seminars, and listen to their “Artificial Intelligence Show” podcast. Do it!

Decode: A daily news and info resource. Decode “unlocks exclusive access to Decode’s ultimate AI tool book, with 500+ verified, vetted, and powerful tools across 40+ categories.” Includes AI tutorials, lists of what’s new, etc. A smart one.

Superhuman: Yes, more info and news. Their words — “Learn how to leverage AI to boost your productivity and accelerate your career. Join the world’s biggest AI newsletter with 650,000+ readers from companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft and more.”

AI Tool Report: Yes…. More… “Learn AI in 5 minutes a day. We’ll teach you how to save time and earn more with AI. Join 500,000+ free daily readers from Tesla, Apple, A16z, Meta, & more.”

Matt Wolfe: A rather beyond-decent YouTube channel dedicated to AI.

A Short But Sweet List of The Best AI Directories For Marketers

We are all a bit (understatement) overwhelmed with the barrage of new AI tools. To help sort this overload, here is a list of what I think are today’s easiest-to-use AI directories for marketers. Note, this is a short list.

Futurepedia – From Google Bard: “This directory is one of the largest and most comprehensive, with over 3,000 AI tools and resources listed. It’s a great place to find AI tools for a variety of tasks, including machine learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.” Just today… 18 new tools. Yikes.

Zain Kahn’s Superhuman – The world’s biggest AI newsletter with 350k+ readers.

Marketing AI Show – THE best AI podcast for marketers.

iLib – AI websites listed by popularity.

Product Hunt – As they say: “Product Hunt surfaces the best new products, every day. It’s a place for product-loving enthusiasts to share and geek out about the latest mobile apps, websites, hardware projects, and tech creations.”

Crunchbase – A comprehensive list of AI startups. Wowzer, this is a hot venture universe. Go find your new marketing agency client here.

GPTE – Just in case you need MORE!

Advertising Agency Target Market Persona

Peter · June 6, 2024 · 1 Comment

My Advertising Agency Target Market

Thanks to Andy Crestodina (I interviewed him in my book “How To Build A Kick-Ass Advertising Agency” and read him religiously on LinkedIn), I built this target persona prompt for my advertising agency consultation target market.

Adjust this prompt to build a persona for your advertising agency’s target market.

My ChatGPT Persona Prompt…

Build me a persona of an advertising agency owner with leadership role at marketing agency]. This person is looking for help with business development and is considering hiring a consultant List their hopes/dreams, fears/concerns, emotional triggers and decision criteria for hiring/contacting a advertising agency management consultant.

Sure, let’s build a persona for an advertising agency owner with a leadership role at a marketing agency who is considering hiring a consultant for business development.

Here You Go — My Advertising Agency Target Market

Persona: Jane Doe, Advertising Agency Owner

Background

Name: Jane Doe
Age:45

Role: Owner and CEO of a mid-sized advertising agency
Experience: 20 years in the marketing and advertising industry
Location: Major metropolitan city

Goals and Aspirations – Hopes/Dreams:

– To expand the agency’s client base and increase revenue
– To become a leader in innovative advertising solutions
– To improve operational efficiency and productivity
– To establish the agency as a thought leader in the industry
– To build a strong, cohesive team that delivers outstanding results

Fears and Concerns

– Losing market share to competitors
– Struggling to keep up with rapidly changing industry trends and technologies
– The risk of making poor business decisions that could harm the agency
– High turnover rates among key employees
– Maintaining a consistent and strong brand reputation

Emotional Triggers

– Passion for creativity and innovation in advertising
– Commitment to client satisfaction and long-term relationships
– Desire for recognition and prestige within the industry
– Frustration with operational inefficiencies and missed opportunities
– Concern over financial stability and sustainable growth

Decision Criteria for Hiring a Consultant

– Proven Track Record:** Evidence of successful business development strategies implemented for similar agencies
– Industry Expertise:** In-depth knowledge of the advertising and marketing landscape
– Cost-Effectiveness:** Reasonable fees and clear ROI projections
– Client Testimonials and Case Studies: Positive feedback from previous clients
– Customized Solutions: Tailored strategies that address specific challenges and goals of the agency
– Communication Skills: Clear and transparent communication throughout the consultancy process
– Flexibility and Adaptability: Ability to adapt strategies based on the agency’s evolving needs
– Compatibility: A good cultural fit with the agency’s values and work style

Additional Insights

– Preferred Channels for Contacting Consultants:
– Recommendations from industry peers and professional networks
– Research through industry conferences and events
– Online reviews and consultant websites
– Direct outreach from consultants with a personalized pitch

Evaluation Process:

– Initial meeting to discuss needs and potential solutions
– Review of proposals and assessment of their feasibility
– Checking references and past performance
– Trial projects or short-term engagements to assess compatibility and effectiveness

This persona provides a comprehensive understanding of the advertising agency owner’s motivations, concerns, and criteria for hiring a business development consultant.