How Does Pitching Work When Trying To Get Work From Advertising Agencies?

Key Takeaways

okay so let's get into pitch the pitch the pitch we used to do the pitch like the way I described just tell us some things I don't even know what you want I'm just going to present this thing to you and that used to work because back then there weren't a lot of competition and there's a lot of money those are factors in favor of you me but as there's more competition and less money it becomes harder and harder to do that so what you want to do is one is though they may not know what's that what a pitch is oh okay I'm sorry a pitch generally refers to uh doing speculative work in the hopes of getting a job not even a client just a job sometimes other Studios oh almost always against other Studios it's a competitive pitch okay it's usually with at least three people three companies fighting for the same job let's say I have a a TV commercial a 30 second spot that I want you guys to do I'll invite you you and you and you guys will throw ideas at it and I get to pick who I want to work with inv or do you reach out um we're almost always invited and and we're invited because our sales reps are reaching out okay okay so they're always looking for opportunities for us every once in a while the phone will ring and they call us and it's a different scenario so I'm going to tell you the two ways we procure work here okay when we're doing commercials it's almost always through a sales rep the sales rep are independent they don't work here they have relationships with agency producers and art directors and they're always listening for like the Rumblings of a new campaign that's going to go up and if they feel like you're right they're going to slip you in there and then they look at them like yeah we'll give them a shot agency calls you and says you know here's the script pitch on it and then we ask what's the budget and all these kind of things how many people are competing on it and we determine if we should pitch on it or not so when you're doing with uh dealing with commercials it's unpaid Zer and we have spent a while ago like almost $30,000 going after after a job did you get it no that's the brutal world of pitching it's horrific and it seems to be very specific to advertising practices when you go elsewhere nobody expects you to work for free and like I said before supply and demand are out of whack so this is an industry Trend here there are more people willing to pitch than there are those that aren't willing to pitch so if you want to play the game you have to learn how to pitch that's it now if you work with clients directly in different places you don't have to pitch we don't pitch then at all okay does that make sense because they come to us and we say Well we'd like to work with you but this is what we charge we don't do speculative work and they insist and we say no and then we just walk away all right saying no is a very powerful thing [Applause]