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By Root 443 0

You can do it two ways. You can have a standard regular pitch which you make to every prospective new client. Or you can do a lot of work on spec, showing the guy what kind of campaign he should have. Mostly the new and younger agencies feature a standard pitch. They don’t believe in freebies – for anybody. The older agencies – the establishment, which is running scared – will do anything for new business and they’ll go to any lengths, like preparing a whole campaign on spec. Like the TWA thing, which is the great example. One thing good that did come out of the TWA pitch was a growing reluctance on the part of all agencies to do free work.

There is still a third way to get an account, but it is really going out of style fast. What happens is that the chairman of the board of an old-fashioned big agency learns that an account is loose and remembers that he went to school with Bunny or Snoopie or whatever, who now is chairman of the board of the account. The advertising chairman of the board calls his friend at Chase Manhattan and the banker quietly sets up a discreet lunch for the two chairmen of the board. They have a terrific lunch, which is featured by the lack of talk about advertising. Maybe they’ll talk about their mutual friend Stinky who was a big man because he stole the town bell one night after the senior hop. You’ve got to understand that the two chairmen of the board really can’t discuss advertising, because they don’t know a thing about it. After the lunch, if the account chairman is feeling good, he’ll give the account to the agency chairman on the spot because he trusts him and ‘he’s our kind of person.’ However, with so much more money at stake these days, this kind of pitch is going out of style. Only once did I ever run into a guy I knew when I was a kid in Brooklyn. We were pitching a radio station and this kid who used to hang around the same street corner as I did turned out to be the account executive of the radio station. It was the first time I ever had a common background with a potential account. We sat around talking about old times, you know, things like ‘Hey, whatever happened to Baldy?’ ‘I don’t know.’ ‘What happened to Louie Nuts?’ ‘Well Louie Nuts is doing three to five in Dannemora.’ ‘And how about Whacky?’ ‘Whacky?’ ‘Yeah, you remember, Whacky was the guy with the funny pointy head.’ ‘Oh, yeah, Whacky.’ It turns out that out of the first twenty years of his life, Whacky spent ten in various prisons. I’m not very good on pitches that depend on schoolboy chums.

CHAPTER

TWELVE

PROFILES

IN

WARM

AND

HUMANE

COURAGE

‘Presentations are like an opening night on Broadway. It’s very big, it’s the make-or-break moment for an agency, and there is a lot of very tough pressure on everyone. You’ve got thirty-six minutes and your audience is sitting there, and like who knows what’s going to happen? Sometimes you barely get the presentation off the ground before disaster strikes …’

Good agencies refuse to work up a free presentation. The agency which is forced to work up a presentation is an agency that is in trouble. It’s an agency that is desperate, insecure about showing the work they’ve already done. There was a soap commercial on the air and it featured a little girl running up to her mother with a slip which had just been washed in the soap, and the little girl says, ‘Mommy, smell my slip.’ Now if you’re the agency that turned out that little job you really don’t want to go showing it to prospective clients, do you? All right, so a possible client comes to you and says, ‘We don’t like what our present agency is doing for us creatively, what can you do?’ Well, you’re faced with the prospect of either showing the little girl smelling her slip or turning out something on spec. What is happening today in all of advertising is accounts are coming in to talk creative. The main source of dissatisfaction that accounts have is in the creative area.

When an agency has no smarts in an area like the creative area, they have to go to a pitch. So they come up with a campaign. They work