Losing is Winning.
Positioning your brand never stops.
Positioning an agency is one of the hardest and most time consuming creative projects I’ve ever worked on. No matter what agency I’ve worked at, it’s an obsession that never stops. If we’re the experts of communication we have to have a clear point of difference. The world doesn’t need another ad agency, especially one that sounds like all the others.
In the summer of 2013, we won AdAge Small Agency of the Year 1–10. All 6 employees were shocked and the phone started ringing. We’d always preferred a very calculated approach to the clients we took on to ensure we could under-promise and over-deliver. Around November we were invited to pitch Dockers, Old Navy and a project for Gap. Three incredible opportunities. All on the exact same timeline, with final presentations falling on the exact same week.
We knew we couldn’t pull this off with 6 people, and even with our most trusted freelancers, three pitches at the same time would be too much. We decided to turn down the one we were least excited about creatively, and luckily it happened to be the one that was not offering a pitch fee. I made the call to say thanks and ‘sorry not sorry’ — only to be talked right back into it by a savvy marketer. She said the magic words, “of all the agencies, we think you’ve got the best shot” I bought it.
As the pack whittled down to fewer and fewer agencies, we were feeling good about our tissue session (for anyone reading that doesn’t work in advertising, a tissue session is basically a first date) — they would cut a few agencies after each round, but we kept getting invited back. As final presentations approached we were excelling at ideation and design, but stumbling on how to best articulate our strategic thinking. We would spend hours and hours building up our thinking only to tear it all apart the next day. Nights. Weekends. Mornings. Late evenings. Total chaos. Every time we would come up with something new, the next day it felt generic. We started to realize at the absolute worst time possible that as an agency we had no POV on what we brought to our own industry.
We pushed through — and felt great going into the final week. We delivered our presentations and flew back to Los Angeles with a heavy pitch hangover. Did we ask enough questions? Should we have rewritten the brief? Maybe we bit off more than we could chew. Should I have pushed back on the brief that said “no humor”? Final decisions were set to come back in a week.
“Thanks but — ” “Great showing but — ” “We will definitely bring you in on the next one.” One by one. Whiff. Whiff. Whiff. 0 for 3 and I had the pleasure of gathering the team together to give them the news.
We had to ask ourselves some tough questions. If someone was going hire us for a year, what are they getting above and beyond the deliverables in the brief? What drives us? How will our philosophy help guide their business and marketing for a year to come?
Many of our clients have struggled to keep up with how fast competitors and technology are moving.
We also wanted to find a way of thinking that was endemic to our agency — and tied to the concept of time. Many of our clients have struggled to keep up with how fast competitors and technology are moving. There is no time to react and prepare for what’s next, or what we call ‘tomorrow.’ This was our starting point. We framed up our thinking with a simple phrase –‘We’re set on Tomorrow’– and then backed it up with a simple formula we use to get us there: Yesterday + Today = Tomorrow. We believe the truths of a brand’s past combined with a good hard look at the cultural shifts of the present will set them on a growing differentiated path towards the future. We use this for every pitch, every campaign, every brand positioning.
Since we rolled this process out — clients know we are actively working to keep pace with the change and uncertainty the future will bring. Our success rate in new business pitches has soared — we’ve added work from Sephora, Twitter, Westfield, and TOMS to name a few.
This process isn’t a silver bullet, and I don’t want to give anyone illusions of grandeur. An agency methodology must be fluid, be able to change with the times, and needs constant attention and revisions. Winning a pitch also requires a relentless amount of hard work, dedication, and drive. I was in a room with Dan Wieden when he said, “to work in advertising you must be able to thrive in a constant state of confusion” and that’s especially true in a pitch.
Three years into the new pitch process, it feels like we are just getting it started. We always try to find a win, even in a loss. Tomorrow is always a new day, with new questions to be asked.
