As part of my occasional series of posts on Insights Based on Freelancing at Other People’s Agencies, this time my thoughts turn to Pitching.
I’ve worked on rather a lot of pitches recently, of all shapes and sizes. Since the last couple of agencies I was employed by worked in a fairly similar way, I’d assumed that the pitch process was pretty much the same wherever you worked. It seems not.
I work for two agencies of a similar size. At one the MD’s pitch style is so hands-on he was pulling files together on a mac and had to be talked out of personally showing me how to work the binding machine. At the other, I have yet to meet the MD.
I’ve been into agencies who are really hot on things like copyright and intellectual property statements on pitch docs and ones who have never heard of putting copyright stickers on pitch boards.
Then there’s the agency that gave me a couple of weeks and a decent budget to pull qualitative research together for a big pitch (yay!) – and the one that asked me in to do the insight for a creative pitch response that had already been visualised.
So what I think I’m saying is there’s a lot of ways of approaching a project like a pitch – and perhaps no one way is the right way? Although I hope there won’t be too much retro-fitted, post-creative insight work to do in 2011…
This t-shirt is a direct quote from the gloriously cringe-worthy Agency.com Subway pitch and a reminder to us all that at the end of the day, it’s only a meeting.