Pigs, pitching and the Denver 50

I'm not the first person to blog this quote. Or the second, third, fourth, fifth or sixth:

The whole creative process is stupid. It's like washing a pig. It's messy, it has no rules, no clear beginning, middle, or end; it's kind of a pain in the ass, and when you're done, you're not sure if the pig is clean or even why you were washing a pig in the first place.

That goes double for pitching, which Marc Brownstein recently laid into at Small Agency Diary:

I'm not advocating abstinence from dating. It's just that the courting process has gone too far. It's often a waste of an agencies' time to pitch among 12 other shops. Narrow it down, clients! Apply some discipline to the process.

Pure's Gregg Bergan had a good column in The Denver Business Journal not too long ago. He opined that a trip through an agency's portfolio and a long lunch was a better predictor of relationship success than a creative shootout:

Schedule a time to visit each agency. Ask to meet with your entire prospective team and no others. Don't agree to a meeting until all of them can make it. Ask to see a portfolio that represents the work of the actual people who would be on your account. If the agency portfolio includes work of others, you don't want to see it.

OK. But the pitch process survives not only because clients like seeing a bunch of work for free. Creative departments, despite the strain, often love a shootout. It's competitive. Energetic. And win or lose, it gives writers and art directors a whole lot of chances to produce stuff for their books.

When we created the idea for The Denver 50, we all agreed that past award shows thrived on snappy headlines and big egos. And we wanted the New Denver Ad Club's first show to let go of those things and embrace the thinking of agencies like Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Anomaly and StrawberryFrog.

Letting go of the pitch process would take the same sort of willpower.

Dumb ways to kill good work

Some cliches earn their status. Others are memorable mostly for their inanity. And still others lie in between.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

A brilliant insight. Also a clueless, lazy assertion.

It's said a lot by clients. Luke Sullivan took them on in Hey, Whipple, Squeeze This.

Sometimes clients need to be reminded that their product isn't substantially different from the competition's. All that may distinguish the two is the advertising you propose... You need to get your client to see that execution can be content and personality can be proprietary. They're called "pre-emptive claims" - claims any competitor could've made had they moved fast enough.

All well and good. But what if the objection is raised not by the client, but by someone who should know better? An account executive. Worse, a creative director.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

Often the definition of "anybody" seems to float along with the motivations of the objector. For instance, Adidas ran a spot where an Olympic weightlifter snatched a heavy barbell, pumped his fist, and walked offscreen. The spot ended with the Adidas logo and the tagline "Forever Sport." Adidas has a rich athletic history and a product line that validates this claim. A smart planner would have supported it. But cover up the Adidas logo and you could easily believe you'd watching an ad for the USOC, Gatorade or even Nike. If the same planner woke up on the wrong side of the bed on that particular day, the campaign could have been consigned to the agency basement.

And even when a claim isn't unassailably authentic, a well-done ad can create ownable space all by itself. Saatchi/London's classic work for XXXX claimed, "Australians wouldn't give a XXXX for anything else." Except that Wikipedia reports that XXXX is one of a few beers popular in Queensland, and unpopular throughout much of the rest of Australia.

"If you cover up the logo, that ad could be for anybody."

Um yeah. And if we covered up the photo, that logo would be sitting next to some whitespace. It's all nonsense. We're not going to cover up the logo, we're going to end up making it 10% bigger. So please, unless the claim is random to the point of dishonesty, give it a rest.