Everyone Knows What Is What but They Don’t Know What Is What

This year we’ve been involved in three significant pitches and they all shared a theme. Outside of a thoughtful intermediary, clients pitted indie agencies with differing specialisms against one another in an effort to work out an efficient solution. 

Sometimes we found out after the event, others we found out in the process. Each time it was chaotic, each time, all the agencies ran around trying to find the skills to augment their specialist offering to give themselves a chance of winning. 

Agencies pretending that they know what is what, but they don’t know what is what, because the client isn’t sure they know what is what. As Matt Cooper identified earlier this year in our podcast with the Microdose, it’s becoming an increasingly destructive trend.

It’s always been an issue for indie agencies but it feels as though it’s reaching new levels of crazed uncertainty, as clients become bamboozled by the ever-growing list of shiny new tools. Throw into the mixer that the traditional process of the ‘pitch’ is painfully tricky too (cost, impact on well-being, idea theft etc.) and the process isn’t much fun for all. I don’t think the client gets closer to really knowing what they actually want and creative companies end up battering one another in a cannibalistic end game. 

What’s the solution? I wouldn’t claim to have one silver bullet. But when a similar pitch came along, we stripped out all the bollocks. We simplified and focused on what our specialist creative philosophy is and how it can help with one significant part of the client’s challenge. 

We didn’t bring in multiple partners, we didn’t wang on about media spend, google search, algorithms, mega consumer trends, segmentations, tracking new age digital marketing funnels or other. Things we know a bit about. 

We simply focused a conversation about the one thing we know we could offer to change for them better than anyone else with a positively bonkers idea. We did it with a short creative demo (not 100 slides) and a couple of case studies that we admired and added value by explaining how a similar change would impact their business. 

We didn’t get distracted that a new website, PR, branded collateral, internal comms and a social media strategy was up for grabs too. We just focused things into a simple presentation demo on what we knew we could change. They saw our philosophy, they know our value, we won. 

They’re now interested in having a chat about how our creative philosophy might work in social and other comms. We might well bring in other partners, but we might not. 

Know your specialism, know your creative philosophy, so more clients know what is what.

So that we all know what is what.