Disturbing Read On An Innovative Pitching Process

“Revitalising the pitching process“, an opinion article by Daniele Fiandaca, intrigued me so bad that I couldn’t decide if it’s safe to share it publicly or not. After sleeping on the idea, I made up my mind and chose to put it here, where I can both express my feelings and reach a small but friendly audience.

Here’s a fragment of the text, describing one of the steps of an “UnPitch experiment” conducted by Converse in the UK:

The Briefing – rather than get all the agencies to rewrite the brief and kill the life out of it (from my experience, agency briefs tend to be so dull), the client wrote a clear brief (which did not need rewriting by five different agencies). Converse hosted a half day session with all the agencies together with the sole intention of inspiring and interacting with the creatives who were going to deliver the ideas – suits and planners were banned from the process.

Full article here

The story ends with a very optimistic call to action from the author, encouraging everyone to “send it to every brand manager/marketing director they know, then maybe we can get them to think differently next time they think about running a pitch. Hopefully this might lead to the industry looking a little less broken, with more time for inspiration and spending time with our peers.”

And that’s the point where I got very scared.

I feel that promoting such an experiment would be just like distributing a horrible weapon to the wrong hands. I think you first have to learn the rules so you know how you can break them properly. And I hope, just like a child in front of an unopened chocolate bar, to live the day when we’ll get there. But until then, until we’ll reach that ideal context for that ideal process to foster the ideal ideas, I’ll just have to settle for working our *sses off, for personal fights, for personal wins, for team playing, for team mistakes, for stubborn clients, for “almost there” feedbacks, for quick pitches, for long developments, for failed meetings and more.

I don’t believe in the existence of “cushy communications excellence” and in reality, the outcome of those perfectly imperfect methods is exactly my motivation for working in this industry.

Homo Digitalis

TalkTalk’s Digital Anthropology Report studied how British people use the internet and found that there are six distinct ‘tribes’ of internet user in the UK. This video introduces you to the tribes from the report, the Digital Extroverts, Social Secretaries, Web Boomers. The full report can be found here

Me = Digital Extrovert, taking  the internet for granted and revel in what it enables me to do.

Wich tribe are you? QUIZ