TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FROM THE BEGINNING August 4, 2008
Posted by brainactivist in How to sell creative ideas.Tags: creative pitches, presentations
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One of the worst creative presentations I ever had was with UPS. It was one of the rare times that I participated in a pitch with another company. This was their contact and I was happy to have the opportunity.
The presentation took place in a huge room with theater seating. My co-presenter and I were in the “pit” part of the room and the 8 people from UPS were in one small part of this big room. It was already uncomfortable. The group was very unresponsive and not at all interactive. My partner went through her part which was basically her canned PowerPoint about her company. She was a very good presenter and had done this many times.
Then I presented the creative work. It was mediocre which was truly a first for me. We generally present great work and I’m very fired up and can’t wait to show it. This was different because 1) we didn’t have proper input; 2) there was very little time; 3) the brief we were given actually turned out to be wrong; and 4) there were lots of politics invovled in that there was an in-house agency (present at this meeting) who felt the work should go to them.
This dud of a performance made me truly appreciate the importance of the critical front-end input I was always used to getting, and of being well informed about the situation. If you want something to go perfectly, I believe you have to run the show from the beginning. But that’s just me. How about you?
