The Bottom Rung » Media

Pitching (and Winning) New Business

Angus Gastle — Fri, 29 May 2009 13:54:44 +0000

You’re in the room. In a few moments the client will be there. The AV is setup and (thankfully) working after a few failed attempts. Your team is nervously ruffling their notes or mouthing their scripts to the nearest patch of carpet. Yes, it’s Pitch Day.

The tension inside the pitch room is palpable. It’s a mixture of stress, adrenaline and butterflies. While my role was only a small part of the larger presentation, watching all our hard work come together in a flawless 27 minutes of power point prowess was quite a sight.

While we didn’t end up winning the business (therefore making my record 0-1), it was not all a loss. It took Leo Burnett many years of hard work to even get an RFP let alone get in the room. So that on its own was a small success.

In my opinion, the secret to success is to show your potential clients that you not only have the muscle and the foresight to get the job done, but that you work well as a team and could potentially do great things together. Chemistry, in advertising, between clients and agency peeps is of the utmost importance for longterm success – even more so that than the work itself. If McDonald’s isn’t happy with the work Cossette is creating, they’ll ask Cossette to change it or hire a new creative team who can. But they won’t fire them.

Unlimited budgets for ads that work

Angus Gastle — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 19:25:53 +0000

Advertising budgets. The bane of any account person’s existence. But why do we have them?

Immediate excuses that pop into mind include: “because we have to our numbers for the quarter”, “the recession means we have to curtail our spending” and “cause my boss said so.” But Seth Godin sees it differently.

When Amazon was at its key growth peak, the mantra there was $33. They would buy unlimited ads, of any kind, as long as they generated new customers for $33 or less each. There was a risk that $33 was too high a number for the business to sustain, but the ads were no risk at all. As long as they came in under that number, there was unlimited money to buy them.

Read his smart article on ad budgets here.

Source: Seth Godin

Bad Media Buy

Angus Gastle — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:40:20 +0000

The most glorious media buy in all history

Angus Gastle — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:59:33 +0000

This is one of the best ambushes I have ever seen. And they pulled it off on the internet no less. Just goes to show media placement can be just as important as the ad itself.

On top of that, they are getting some serious mileage out of the blogosphere chatter that is going on…

I believe they have removed it now from CNet but here is the link anyway.

Fox buys small army of money counters

Angus Gastle — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 16:33:33 +0000

Why are we already talking Superbowl? It’s not for another 91 days according to the NFL’s ~~unnecessarily specific~~ countdown timer. Do we really need to know how many seconds to kick off? …I can already hear football fans plotting against me for that one.

The blogosphere is already buzzing. Adage has reported that Superbowl spots are ~90% sold out. NINTEY PERCENT, THREE MONTHS IN ADVANCE. I doubt FOX is complaining. As Vallyewag reported, “At $2.7 million per 30-second spot, TV advertising is far from dead, or in need of help from Google. In fact, Fox is likely to bring in more than $160 million in ad revenues during the Super Bowl. That’s more than Facebook is projected to make this entire year.”

Some other perks this year include a placement on their official Myspace page to further hock their wares. I’m sure that little gem will spice up many a pitch to the client. It might even help keep the client’s mind off the fact that they are playing almost 3 Million for 30 seconds before they have even shot anything. And to stand out, it has to be better than the best of Madison Avenue. That’s an expensive proposition.

For reference, one of my favourite superbowl ads.