How to Structure Your Next Pitch

I’m not a fan of pitch templates. There is no surer way to deaden the vitality and spark of a creative idea than to compress it awkwardly into a pre-formatted PowerPoint or Keynote document.

The best pitches are those that are as creative as the ideas they’re selling.

Often a truly memorable pitch will derive its form from the content being presented. I remember once pitching a brand campaign to a network of local radio stations. We presented the concept by having a series of albums mounted on the walls of the agency. The title of each album encapsulated a different aspect of our idea. We took the client through our proposal, album by album. As they left, instead of a deck we gave them a playlist. This anecdote would be better if I could now tell you we won the pitch. We didn’t. The client loved the pitch, but they thought the work itself was too bold. Plus ça change …

If you want to create a compelling — and hopefully, winning — pitch, no matter what format you ultimately choose to showcase your idea, there are four essential things you need to know. These four vertebrae can then become the backbone of your presentation. You can dress them up any way you wish, but without them you’ll lack the solidity you need to make a convincing creative argument.

They are the Challenge, the Insight, the Idea and the Execution.

The Challenge is the business or strategic or brand problem you are being invited to solve, summed up in a single sentence. Getting the brief down to a single sentence should, anyway, have been one of your first tasks on receiving the original brief. It’s a great way to cut the wheat from the chaff and determine what is really important. And once you have an encapsulation of the brief, when you pitch you can move swiftly through it to your proposal, which, after all, is what the client is interested in. There’s no surer way to lose them early on than recapitulating the brief in tedious detail.

The Insight is the key to unlocking the brief. It’s the way into the creative, the foundation of your concept, the reason your idea makes sense. It’s the most valuable part of your thinking and the element most often overlooked by a naïve pitching team. Why will your idea resonate with a real world audience?

The Idea is … your idea, but described in the single most elegant and evocative and compelling sentence you can think of. One sentence. No more. Ideally you want anyone who was in your pitch to be able to describe your idea to a colleague who wasn’t. To make sure that happens you need to help them with a crisp summation.

The Execution is where you have some fun. Go to town on enabling the client to envisage your idea with all the colour and passion and verve that you do — mood-boards, music references, storyboards and the rest.

Let’s see how the formula works with one of the UK’s favourite commercials of all time, this classic — Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’.

This a good case in point because …

A. It was hugely successful

B. On the face of it, having a gorilla play the drums to sell a chocolate bar doesn’t exactly make a whole lot of sense.

Now, I should preface what I’m going to say by underlining that I didn’t work on this project, but I know from those who did that you can break down how the idea was presented into our four vertebrae …

The Challenge was to maintain and increase the position of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk as the UK’s favourite chocolate bar.

The Insight from the agency who won the pitch was that Cadbury’s competitors talk about the intrinsic properties of their chocolate (creaminess, taste etc). But what people love about chocolate isn’t really the flavour, it’s the blast of pleasure giving chemicals each mouthful induces in our brains.

The Idea is simple — let’s forget about the chocolate itself and dramatize the rush each mouthful brings.

The Execution is a joyful metaphor for the anticipation + reward cycle of eating chocolate — a gorilla playing everyone’s favourite drum break. Thank you Phil Collins.

Challenge, Insight, Idea and Execution.

Each of these four steps can be simply encapsulated. There are no logic jumps or diversions. The argument is compelling and has an irresistible inevitability. Like a slinky on a stairway, one step flows inexorably to the next.

So next time you have to present an idea, whether that’s in a multi-agency international pitch or simply to your creative director over a coffee, make sure the first thing you do is to break your thinking down into these four steps. And when you’re done treat yourself to a bar of chocolate, because you’ve just taken the first step in building a winning pitch.