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By Root 377 0

as though they had the account. They go out and take pictures, they work up marketing plans, spend fortunes on shooting rough commercials. They spend thousands of dollars. They get photographers to work for them for reduced rates. They say, O. K., do this for half price now and you can sock one of my clients later when we come to you.’ The current clients of the agency end up paying for presentations. If there is a scandal in the business, it’s the money that clients are paying for work that they never see. A typical example: A large agency has a presentation to do. They write off a lot of it. They take the bills they get for the presentation and spread them throughout the other accounts in the agency. Let’s say they get a $400 stat bill for the presentation. They’ll dump that $400 on the twenty accounts that they have in the agency. So it’s $20 an account, and what does the account know?

When they tell their art director to do something as cheaply as possible, the only thing the art director can say to the photographer is to do it for half price now with the promise that he can sock it on the next bill. Type bills: same thing happens. Sure, they get somebody to cut the type bill, but that type bill shows up later on in some other poor guy’s bill. Instead of paying $25 for something, he winds up paying $29. He doesn’t question it – what does the client know about the cost of setting type? – it’s only a $4,00 difference. The type people aren’t going to absorb the loss. Somebody has to pay for it, so the existing clients foot the bill. When an agency does a full-scale presentation, somebody has to pay for it – that’s obvious. What isn’t so obvious is that the current clients have to do the paying. How do you think a prospective client would feel if, during a pitch, he was told that this pitch came to him through the courtesy of the other clients at the agency? He’d think the way I would – swell, but what happens if I give you my business? Do I have to pay for pitches you’re going to make in the future? Think of the time spent on pitches. The account executive, the art director, copywriters, media people, research people, all of these guys working on a new pitch. If they’re spending their time thinking about new business, they’re not thinking about their regular accounts. This is very unfair. It’s unfair of an advertiser to ask for a campaign and it’s very unfair of an agency to accept the offer to make a pitch with a full campaign.

I would say that most of the smaller and newer agencies won’t touch a pitch if a campaign is asked for. The reason for this is partly pride and partly common sense. Smaller agencies work like hell – they’ve got fewer people per account than larger agencies do and they really don’t have the time to start pulling people off regular accounts to prepare a campaign. We do what a lot of agencies do: a regular, standard, straight-up pitch. It runs exactly thirty-six minutes – no more, no less. We show what we’ve done in the past, we give a one-minute philosophy of our approach, we answer any questions the account might have, and that’s that. If we don’t get the account, we didn’t deserve to get it. They know as much about us in those thirty-six minutes as they ever will know. We’ve got our pitch broken down to seven minutes of commercials. Then you show your print ads, explain a bit about the background of each ad, and that’s that.

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. Ron Travisano and I made a pitch not long ago to a very nice guy named Jerry O’Reilly, who handled the Evening in Paris perfume business. We walked into the offices and they were the slickest offices I’ve seen in a long time. We gave our names to a receptionist and this guy comes down this great long hall. This guy is Mr.