Feb 19

Feb 19 What Labour’s Election Loss Can Teach Us About Pitching

I spent the final weeks of 2019 doing almost exclusively two things: following the UK election and pitching. I’d be in by eight in time for Today’s news bulletin and leave in time for Brexitcast to accompany me home. As the drama unfolded -the good days and the bad days, the break-throughs and the disasters - I realised that these two parts of my life were inextricably linked. Both are a winner takes all race to convince an audience to cast their vote your way. Here are six things I learned about loss along the way:

Answer the question

The classic mistake of pitching is to answer the question you want to answer, not the one the client is asking. It doesn’t matter if it leads to better work or it is more exciting, talking about what you want to talk about is a sure-fire way to lose fast.

In 2019 both political parties were set a specific question around Brexit and Labour chose to ignore it completely. Instead they chose to talk about what they wanted, hoping that enthusiasm and ideation would mask the fact they were out of touch. Many an agency pitch has been doomed before it’s even begun by not truly understanding what is being asked of them.

Be liked

As a young planner I used to be pretty scathing of the props, theatre and sickening sucking up that went into ‘creating chemistry’. I thought the work spoke more than the smalltalk and if push came to shove I would prefer to be respected than liked. A planner should know better. Our social biases mean that the more liked you are the more people are likely to agree with you. Labour, and Corbyn in particular, failed in this. One can blame the undeniable press assanitation but the truth is Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t liked. Whether you feared him, disagreed with him or just found his idiosyncrasies annoying, not enough people liked him personally and that proved to be a big problem.

Distill everything

The more time you have on a pitch the shorter it should be. It doesn’t matter how many times people say ‘less is more’ it’s still hard to do. We can’t help fall back on the idea that industry will be rewarded. Can’t decide which idea is best? Put both in. Not sure whether ideas are good enough? Put more in. The more you put in the more you cloud the issue.

Labour’s manifesto was vast. They held it aloft proudly citing all the work that had gone into it. Comprehensive but confusing. The most important lesson politics has given us in the last five years is that clarity trumps everything. That proved fatal for Labour - plenty of pitches have gone the same way.

Big ideas take time to land

Ed Milliband interestingly stated in his analysis of the Labour defeat that he felt some of the Labour ideas were too big and weren’t given enough time to be accepted. In particular he calls out the idea of a four day working week. He believes that that same policy communicated over years would have been very popular. Rushed forward as it was, it proved deeply unpopular.

As creative thinkers we’re after big bold ideas and we love the idea of dropping the curtain in the pitch to gasps and applause as we reveal our transformational thought. But that rarely happens. It’s hard for a genuinely challenging idea to be accepted immediately. It often takes time and priming for an idea to be sold in. I’m not saying tell the client everything beforehand but use tissue sessions and check-ins to seed the idea so that it doesn’t feel totally alien when the client first sees it. This isn’t just about checking your work, it’s about making sure that genuinely radical ideas feel imminently buyable when it comes to pitch.

Don’t underestimate the importance of delivery

How many pitches have you done when the production team are drawing up last minute costs or timelines the night before or the morning of? We overvalue ideas and undervalue the importance of logistics and delivery. This is madnesss when you think about it. If you were going to employ builders in your home you’d pick the ones you trusted to deliver well ahead of the sloppy creative visionary. Clients will rarely get fired for not having a radical enough idea, they will certainly get fired if the final output is late, broken or unusable.

Similarly how many ideas have you pitched which you know aren’t possible but they sound good in a pitch. Here’s a tip - the client also knows they’re not achievable. Labour made exactly this mistake. Too much emphasis was put on unrealistic ideas based on a radical vision. It was unachievable and it cost them.

Don’t kid yourself

The final and most dangerous thing throughout the process is to kid yourself. Surround yourself with people who believe the same as you and you can lose yourself in a world where you convince yourself the client wants what you want. Keep going back to the brief, keep challenging yourself. If you get carried away you get into a dangerous space very quickly. Labour’s strength is its weakness. With 500,000 members creating policies it would have been so easy to think the whole country supported those. It was an echo chamber of epic proportions and lulled Labour into thinking they were onto a winner. Even after a catastrophic defeat they still thought they were right. They still think other circumstances prevented them from winning not them. If you listen to excuses from pitch teams after a loss it’s incredible how often other issues are to blame, not your own mistakes.

Lessons for winning a campaign / pitch (delete where appropriate):