Perspectives

During my stay out here, I’ve been lucky enough to shadow some pretty intelligent individuals as they take me through their process on how they handle different aspects of marketing.

Starting at the top, I wanted to get a glimpse of what it looked like when they pitched a client, won and on-boarded them into the agency.

This process can be described in many different ways… back in my home office we refer to this as an “RFP” (Request For Proposal) and I’ve noticed out here, and maybe in other offices, they are more commonly known as “briefs”.

As I shadowed one of the planning teams during a brief, I learned that they really tackle each pitch with an army of experts in each field. Much like my home office, we do the same but the roles are a little bit different.

The Brief

The first step was to analyze the brief to make sure it contained all of the necessary information they needed for the pitch. I met with the whole army of people that were pulled in on this pitch to discuss what we were missing and what we needed. The next step was identifying the brands strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Going through these two steps really helped us figure out where the gaps were and what we needed to do in order to fill those gaps. What it all came down to was information gathering.

Information gathering

We split into teams and focused on gathering information and research that was relevant to the questions we were trying to get answered. For example: category insights, human insights, economic factors etc. that all play a roll on how to make the brand more meaningful.

As we were digging into some of the research, they walked me through how they pulled the data based on their target and then how that data was analyzed. Insights were extracted from the data set that was later reviewed with the larger team to share our learnings. This was a great learning experience for me, since at my home office we usually have an insights team who specializes in this this process and then delivers us the output to review. Getting into the weeds with the data really helped me get a better understanding of how their target behaved.

Telling The Story

The end result was being able to walk the client through and paint a story for them on how we arrived at where we did and why. This process was beautifully done by my host office and was presented by having all of our work printed out and lamented on the walls in our presentation room. This allowed them to actively engage with the client and psychically walk them through the journey.

I was a huge fan of this approach and will be taking all I’ve learned home to share.