Write and Present Better Pitches: Going Multi-Media to Create a Memorable Experience

Whether you’re freelancing or pushing your pen for a large, in-house creative team, your pitches go a long way toward sharing your vision and selling it. Here's one way to get the most out of every pitch.

Meh is the Standard

Creative pitches can be excruciating. We open PowerPoint and it turns our creative excitement and energy into well organized, clipart adorned Meh with none of the passion that sparked the idea.

Here are a few ideas to spice up your next pitch by simplifying your concept and making it an experience for your audience:

• Distill Your Idea – Especially with younger creatives, there’s a desire to brain dump ideas, sharing every iteration and dead end. Avoid this. When you’re presenting a creative idea, you’re presenting to professionals with 100 other things on their mind. Think to yourself: “How do I want my audience to feel? What is that one clear emotion?” Now, find a way to distill that emotion into a simple experience. Make it strong: Pour liquor not beer.

  
  

• Use Your Senses – Too often, we limit ourselves to the written word and the still image when there are so many other ways to convey our ideas. Push yourself to think about how touch might have a place in making your audience feel something. What about sound? Taste? What if turning off the lights in the room helped people understand your idea?

  
  

• Make it an Experience – The longer you work in this industry, the more you’ll be involved in pitches. It can become boring, even rote. I would argue that this is catastrophic for any marketing team because the pitch sets the tone. As a creative, it’s incumbent upon you to bring creative consideration to everything you do. If you show up and walk people through a predictable deck, they might approve your idea and they might churn out the necessary work to see it done. If you hit them with something that surprises and delights, they’ll never forget it, and at your next pitch, you’re likely to have a much more engaged audience.

Case Study: A (Literal) Ticking Clock

I had the opportunity to work up a script for an incredibly powerful riflescope built for military and law enforcement. Its features were myriad, its applications too numerous to list. The video could have easily been a technical muscle flex, driven by specs and power. But that would have been boring and predictable, the exact type of thing everyone in the space is doing. So, I asked myself, “What’s the one thing civilians, military, and law enforcement NEED to know about this optic?”

Working closely with the product team, I distilled this question down to one thing: Time. This scope has already thought of everything, and it gives pros the tools they need to move as fast as the engagement; their riflescope will no longer slow them down.

When I pitched this idea, it was to a full room. This was a flagship optic. At the start of the pitch, I hit play on the sound of a clock ticking, it’s rhythm filling the room. As I delivered the pitch and script with a strong narrative lean, I let the clock play on its own sometimes, just to remind the room of that element of time.

Tension built. When I got to the end of the pitch, where a shot is fired, I stopped the clock and delivered the final line.

The effect was instantaneous: People held up their arms with visible goosebumps. And the final product turned out better than I could have hoped.