Creative pitches and presentations

A creative pitch is a project like any other, only more intense. It is highly complex, in terms of people and materials, in a very short time; often with several teams working in parallel; with more pressure than usual. And it runs like a rollercoaster, operationally and emotionally: stalls and races against the clock, the thrill of an idea and the crisis of “we’ll never make it”.

That is exactly why a pitch is not something to improvise. It can (and must) be organised.

The three pillars

1. A proposal that truly answers the client: a brief read in depth, data and insights on the market and audience, an answer to every possible doubt.
2. Effective teamwork within the time available: the right team, clear tasks, realistic deadlines, constant communication.
3. A compelling story: clarity, concision, storytelling, obsessive care over details.

The team, and its availability

Finding the right skills is the first problem. The second, often bigger, is availability. A lesson I have learned over the years: agency teams tend, by nature, to be permanently overbooked. There is logic to it: an agency sells its people’s time and skills, and if those people are idle for a significant share of their time, the business is at risk. The point is not to slide into exploitation; but for pitches, the practical consequence is that the right people will, in all likelihood, already be busy elsewhere.

The solution takes three steps: assess how much the pitch matters compared with everything else (the client, the budget at stake, the chance of winning); talk to whoever sets priorities (management, heads of department) to see what can be moved; put a reallocation plan in writing, before starting.

Organising the work

The PM’s main tool in a pitch is meetings, as long as they are used wisely.

• Plan the brainstorms at a pace that gives people, or creative pairs, time to research and dig deeper between sessions.
• End every meeting with a clear plan: who does what between now and the next one.
• Keep track of everything, especially ideas, sparks and suggestions that might come in handy later. A shared document is enough; whiteboards and sticky notes get photographed.
• If communication isn’t flowing, add a daily alignment of fifteen or twenty minutes.

Understanding the client

It starts with the brief: read, discussed, summarised in a sheet for the whole team (I talk about it in the guide From brief to Statement of Work). If information is missing: ask the client; look for it elsewhere; failing that, make informed assumptions based on experience. And write the assumptions down as such, so they can be revisited.

Then the analysis, to have a landscape to move in:

• personas, realistic representations of typical customers, with needs, motivations and behaviours;
• the customer journey (what they do, from first contact to purchase) and the customer experience (what they feel along the same path);
• the strengths and weaknesses of the product or service;
• competitors: desk research, benchmarking, current and desired positioning;
• opportunities: trends, technologies, untapped niches.

Insights

An insight is the intuition, often hidden, that makes the difference between an ordinary proposal and one people remember: a truth about people’s motivations or behaviour, grasped through a mix of observation, analysis and instinct. A good insight is targeted at the right audience, answers a real problem, and is new.

An example: for KFC, the agency Mother London built a campaign around a moment everyone recognises, the anticipation of the first bite, when you search for the crispiest spot. No data to present: just a truth people see themselves in.

The insight guides the brainstorm, steers the development of ideas and is often the cornerstone of the presentation.

Brainstorming

The rules:

• a beginner’s mindset: no preconceptions;
• listening and collaboration: at this stage anything goes, there are no right or wrong ideas;
• the right to be wrong;
• it is teamwork: rock stars not admitted.

And two things worth knowing in advance.

No panic. There will be a moment when it seems the idea will never come. It will. And when the convincing one arrives, there will almost certainly be a moment when nothing seems to work any more. It usually isn’t so: the doubt comes from something that can be refined. A short meeting to put it on the table and resolve it is enough.

Creativity doesn’t switch on at command. The mind is always working, sometimes even at night (I keep a notepad on my bedside table). If an idea comes outside the meetings, it goes into the shared document, and the team gets a heads-up.

Choosing the idea

• If the right idea comes straight away, let it settle for at least twenty-four hours. Then ask yourselves whether it still convinces you, and whether it can be improved.
• If there are several options, go back over them with a cool head, gather everyone’s view, score each one. Without forgetting instinct: sometimes the best choice is the one that excites people most.

The criteria: does it solve a real problem, at a precise moment in the customer journey? Is the value proposition immediately clear, and different from the competitors’? Is it feasible with the resources and time available, and with what risks? What impact could it have on the client’s objectives?

Telling it

The presentation is the moment when weeks of work are played out in a few minutes. Some structures that work:

• The hero’s journey. The narrative structure described by Joseph Campbell, with one important twist: the hero is the audience, not the agency. You start from their world, their problem, their doubts; the proposal is the help that lets them pass the test.
• Three acts: capture attention and set the scene; develop the argument; close with an impression that lasts.
• The story spine made famous by Emma Coats, then a story artist at Pixar: “Once upon a time… Every day… One day… Because of that… Because of that… Until finally…”.
• Nancy Duarte’s sparklines: keep alternating “what is” and “what could be”, until the audience wants the change.
• The false start: begin with a story whose ending is predictable, stop it and start again. The audience, caught off guard, gives its full attention to the real solution.

For slides, Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule: no more than ten, no more than twenty minutes, no font smaller than thirty points. And details until the last minute: a design format dedicated to the client, spacing, sizes, typos.

The voice

Presenting has a lot in common with music. There is piano and forte: a low tone for delicate points, which creates closeness; a full one for those that must carry people along. There is tempo: slow for key passages, which need to sink in; faster to bring energy. There is rallentando and accelerando, to lead the listener towards the important point. There are pauses, which are as much a part of the speech as the words. And repetitions, which in music are called refrains and help people remember.

The email that goes with the proposal

When the output travels by email, the email is the first thing the client reads: it is already part of the presentation. Carefully chosen recipients; a subject line that says what it is; a short introduction recalling the objective; the proposal presented with its strengths; a close with a clear next step.