Partner & Head of Development at Mischief | GQ 20 Most Creative Companies in the World | 5x #1 Agency of the Year | Agency Comms Team & New Biz Team of the Year 22, 24 | Fast Co Most Innovative Agency 22, 23, 24
The heyday of pitching is packed with weird and wonderful stories—most of them urban legend at this point. Like the story of an agency CEO who smashed a hotel fire alarm to buy them more time on final pres day. Her team caught wind that a rival shop shared an idea too similar to theirs. Or the one about an agency team that brought 12 wild turkeys to a Wild Turkey bourbon pitch. The animals proceeded to defecate unusually-large amounts (they won the account, so the campfire story goes). Then there’s my personal favorite: The night before a final pitch, the lead creative asked a junior account person on his team to make sure the presentation room was filled with Munchkins—the doughy Dunkin’ treats—because the lead client loved them. It was to be a nice gesture. But when the pitch team arrived in the morning to set up, they were met with several little people who’d been hired in the last 24 hours. That one can't be real. Surely. Can anyone outdo these? Story time 👇
Back in the day, we pitched for a large dairy/milk organization. We weaved in a story around petitioning to put a cow 🐄 on the toonie ($2 coin in Canada 🪙). We made signs 🪧 and picketed on the sidewalk while the clients left the building. “Cow Now!” we chanted. But the high end restaurant on the main floor - known for their beef dishes - thought we were picketing against meat & animal cruelty…and “politely” (read as “not so politely”) asked us to mooove. We won the business.
Hill holliday pitching BMW. Client comes to our offices, parks in the underground garage that serves the whole (massive) building. Every car in the parking garage is a BMW. Still have no idea how they (we) did it...
We once pitched a financial services account and based our pitch around The Butterfly Effect (tiny actions can have enormous effects). For the in person pitch we ended the pitch asking our clients to all open their little boxes in front of them. These beautiful defrosted Monarch butterflies flew all around the room and had the desired effect (we won the business & made the campaign), but what nobody had really thought through was there was now a room with 25 butterflies up in the rafters, another agency coming in and a lot of questions from clients about our plans to wrangle the butterflies.
Oliver McAteer, I remember being told the story of how a London agency (I believe maybe Saatchi) many years back was pitching for British Rail. When the client arrived at the agency for the presentation they were ignored by reception initially, then served some tasteless & cold tea, and some very bad small sandwiches and left to wait for a long time...as they were about to walk out in anger the agency leaders appeared and said: "That's what travelling on British rail is like, let's fix it" (or something like that). They won the account.
On the other end of this spectrum, an agency I worked for felt the need to overcompensate for their boutique size. So leadership hired models to come fill every empty chair in the agency. This resulted in the client being led through a room where half the staff was made up of almost impossibly beautiful women (not one of whom had a laptop) and the rest were staring at them too hard to remember to do any actual work. Said agency did not win the business.
Milking a live cow in Philly on AstroTurf as the Ben & Jerry's clients walked into the agency! (btw, the meeting ended before it started!!)
....im told quite some.time ago a big well known agency in london pitched the global biz for UPS..they did a synconized all agency presentstion from their offices around the world to demonstrate their global capability as an agency who could handle this massive biz. The client suitably impressed with their effort and ability to co ordinate such a complex meeting asked how they managed to get it all done so efficiently. An enthisiastic young account guy( probably working 24hrs without sleep to make it happen) ..pipped up and said we FedExd it. I dont know what happened next.
Nice but these are tame. (The munchkins thing is new and “ouch” though…)
bahahahahah. I needed this. I have stories...
Creative Director @ SICKDOGWOLFMAN | Ex-Video Ezy |
3wMy Mum was a producer, so this probably goes back to the 80s or 90s, and I can't remember the exact details, but an agency based in Melbourne or Sydney had to have an office in the other city to be involved in a pitch. So they lied. They rented an office space, dressed it, filled it with fake staff, held the pitch there, subsequently won the pitch and then had to continue pretending it was their address until quickly 'moving to a new location' which would become the actual new office in the city.