Pitch (im)perfect

What’s the best part of your day?

For people in the right job, it’s when they hear that something they’ve been part of has done really, really well.

For people in the wrong job, it’s Friday afternoon, when they're in weekend mode.

And for people far more shallow than you or I, it’s those sunny days when Claudia the receptionist (pictured) turns up to work dressed more for the beach than the office.

The top five best parts of my day are:

5. Having a great creative idea.

4. Doing something that does really, really well.

3. Getting great feedback from a client.

2. Winning an award.

1. Winning a pitch.

So: yes, I do love those precious brainwave moments when, staring at a tough brief and a blank screen, a moment of inspiration strikes and I have The Big Idea.

It’s also great discovering that something you worked on has just smashed a long-standing control.

Being a precious, emotional creative type, a pat on the back or a couple of words of praise are like manna from heaven to me.

And walking onstage to pick up an award while fellow creatives clap sourly is a particularly sweet moment.

But as I say, winning a pitch tops them all.

Why? Well, three reasons:

i. You have to put an incredible amount of work in to a pitch. So if you discover you haven’t won, you know the agency has spent thousands of pounds that it’s never going to recover. And that if you have won, it was all worthwhile.

ii. Pitches are very competitive. So when you win, it feels like a real achievement.

iii. Winning a pitch means you’re going to be working with a new client, often one you’ve always wanted to work with for ages.

As the agency’s creative director, I’m involved with the creative planning / creative strategy, I’m probably involved with coming up with some of the ‘big ideas’, I’m involved with directing the other creative teams working on the pitch, and I’m going to be presenting the creative ideas at the pitch.

That’s quite a lot of work to do for something you’re not being paid for. 

And it’s a lot of hours to find when you already have a busy day job.

So pitch work is often done in the evenings, working til midnight or even beyond. A diet of cold takeaway pizza. Coming in on Sundays.

Realising what you’ve got isn’t quite right and starting again.

Getting tetchy with the rest of the pitch team as you all succumb to stress and fatigue.

Worrying about whether your presentation on the day will do justice to the quality of thinking you’ve put in.

I’m not sure how many hours we spend on a typical pitch. I’m scared to look at our timesheets and find out. Thousands of pounds worth, that’s for sure.

Plus sometimes you need to call in freelancers to help visualise or mock-up the pitch work.

Hundreds of colour printouts, refining the work each time, at 40p a sheet or whatever our fancy printer costs.

And then the travel costs for the whole pitch team to rock up at the client.

Put it all together, and you could be talking about £10,000 worth of presentation. Which you’ve done for free.

We’ve had a couple of pitches recently.

One we won (I won’t be coy, it was for Macmillan). Brilliant cause, great brand and we put a tremendous amount of work into it. And since winning, we’ve discovered that the team there are really smart and ambitious, so the pitch win really has been one of the highlights of the agency year so far.

The other pitch… vanished. As in, every agency pitched, we got really, really great feedback… but then the charity had a change of heart and decided not to do the activity at all.

So in the end, every agency had gone through the enormously time-consuming and expensive pitch process I’ve just described for nothing.

Perhaps that’s why winning a pitch is my number one.

Because losing one like that sure feels number two. 

Be a bit Buddhist, bro

 
Have you ever thought, about a Christian, “Well that’s not very Christian,” about something they did?

No? Just me then.

When I know someone is a proper Christian who believes in God and everything, I expect them to always turn the other cheek / be a good Samaritan / not covet their neighbour’s ox. And I’m disappointed when they turn out to be as craven, selfish and flawed as the rest of us.

I mention this apropos of nothing, except: I work in an agency that specialises in fundraising. For people who work for charities.

And yet it never (particularly) occurs to me to expect everyone around me to be charitable types. Which is rather a shame really – that I don’t expect us to practice what we preach.

Yes, I have a few direct debits to various good causes. But is that being charitable?

Yes, one of the ‘begging letters’ I write will raise many more times the money than most people will donate in their lifetime. But that’s not being charitable either. It’s just being amazingly brilliant at my job.

Sadly I’m not building up to much of an epiphany here.

But I do know this. I shouldn’t do my job as if it’s pure fluke that it happens to be for charities. As if I might just as easily been working for companies flogging fags / booze / child labour-made trainers.

It isn’t, quite literally, good enough.

I’m not saying people who work for charities don’t care about the cause they work for – many do, passionately.

But are we charitable / humanitarian in the wider sense? Are we kind and giving and charitable to one another?

I’m not advocating some happy clappy kibbutz where everyone’s super-nice at the expense of getting things done.

But maybe it’s possible for us to be top-notch gifted professionals without behaving like we’re just working in an office the same as every other. Without treating each other with less thought and consideration than those we’re supporting.

Maybe we can remember that charity begins at home.

Maybe we can remember to be charitable to each other. More than you'd expect from people, say, who work for an insurance company. (They can just concentrate on behaving in a very risk averse way.)

I bet if everyone involved in working for charities was a bit more Dalai Lama about the way they interacted with each other, it’d mean better work.

And you’d get great people, from dozens of other sectors, desperate to join something where they really felt part of something gooood. 

Rather than, as can be the case, part of something bad that just happens to do good.