By Rick Stanton
In a my last column, I tried to shine some light on determining the order of a successful pitch. Now I’ll attempt to shine a light on pitches you should avoid like the plague.
Amazon’s search for a second headquarters is the poster child for such a debacle. Amazon did what many large, arrogant advertising clients do; they sucker suitors into a false sense of potential success and get them to give away a lot of knowledge.
Amazon got 238 cities to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars demonstrating why they should be the winner in the HQ2 Bakeoff. Not only that, Amazon received an unbelievable amount of data, including demographics and psychographic information, about each of the 238 marketplaces FOR FREE!
All of this to ultimately end up where a betting person would have plunked down everything to begin with—New York City, the ultimate retail and media outpost and Arlington (D.C. folks) which is a five-iron from Jeff Bezo’s Washington Post.
This “pitch” was/is a load of horse crap that wasted most everyone’s time. But in the advertising world, this has been going on for decades.
Highly visible clients with big budgets invite agencies to pitch their business— in most cases, agencies that have zero chance of winning—because they want free thinking, too. Agencies toss their hats into the ring anyway, likely knowing the term “long shot” is an understatement.
They’ll spend hundreds of hours of unbillable time putting together spec strategies and creative, option-after-option for media plans and all other sorts of free brain juice in hopes of getting a wink and a nod from a bunch of self-important schmucks who know they’re using the opportunity and the people involved.
Why do agencies with no shot do this?
I can say with all honesty, my shops never succumbed to the siren’s song of the overreach. Even when we pitched ERNST Home & Nursery, Safeway and Pay ‘N Pak, we had enough inside information to know we did, in fact, have a chance.
That was predicated, in part, on us having the good sense to actually ask the client what they were looking for and whether we matched up. And those three all had the decency to tell us the truth and turned out to be good clients, as well.
The ultimate sticking point with me was the request for free creative. Each agency creative head needs to assess this aspect of the pitch and decide if it’s worth it. We did it for Safeway, but we used it as a way to demonstrate an understanding of their business and not as a way to stun them with our brilliance.
When the matter of spec creative came up, my response was always the same. Why should we give you free thinking when we are charging our current clients for it? Would you be happy to know we were doing that for others if you were already our client?
If you receive an RFP from a client and find out they sent it to every agency within 500 miles, run away. They either don’t know what they’re looking for or they know that they can get a horde of agencies to drop their collective pants.
I once ended up in the finals for University Physicians account against Publicis. Go figure. I knew Publicis would bring a phalanx of people to the final meeting, so I went by myself just to underscore the difference in size of the two shops.
At the start of the Q&A, I asked them a question, “You’ve got the biggest shop in the market against one of the smallest shops in the market. What the hell are you guys looking for?” [By the way, it was all men in the room. Go figure part two.]
One of the review committee members said, “Well Rick, we’ve always had small- to medium-sized shops as our agency. Some of us just wonder what it would feel like to have a bigger agency.”
Having nothing to lose, I replied, “Have you ever had a canned ham shoved up your butt? That’s what it’ll feel like.” It got a huge laugh—and we didn’t get the account.
However, about a year later, I got a call from the head of the review team and he asked me if I “knew anyone who could remove a canned ham.”
Amazon managed to implant hundreds of such hams into some pretty gullible review participants. Don’t let that happen to you.
Ouch!
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/year-after-hq2-announcement-cities-wait-amazon-news-n907456
https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/13/tech/amazon-hq2-nyc-arlington/index.html
