In this new series, AdNews asks marketers to recall memorable pitch moments. Here, TRAVLR CMO Catherine Zaharias looks back on a valuable lesson from a past pitch.
When asked about the most memorable pitch of my career, there’s just one that comes to mind...and not in a good way.
It was circa 2016 and I was working at Nickelodeon Australia as the marketing manager. At the time we were kicking goals across the business. Ratings were through the roof, our digital and multi-platform content was growing and our retail and events business were thriving. And we were on a mission to keep it that way.
In the quest to stay on our A game, across the business we were looking for ways to drive renewed audience engagement with our core franchise brands like PAW Patrol and the ever-iconic Nickelodeon Slime.
As luck would have it, our licensing team secured a meeting with a major Australian retailer to discuss the potential for a national promotion, which was a highly coveted opportunity and of course the perfect way to reach and engage kids and families.
Come pitch day, we naturally pulled out all the stops. The calvary (i.e., a handpicked selection of creatives, digital and social managers and myself) were all wheeled out and we arrived well ahead of time to fully deck out the meeting room with branded stationery, goodie bags, purpose built pull up banners and of course to conduct the all-important PowerPoint set up.
Going into the pitch, we were running somewhat blind as the client was new in her role and had a background in a different industry. We’d also not worked on anything at scale with this partner, so with little historic evidence to work with we were effectively dealing with an unknown entity.
But given our recent performance, well thought out concepts and epic room decor we were feeling quietly confident and excited by the possibility of such a large-scale activation.
At long last, our guest star arrived and immediately the good times came to an end.
Quite literally the first words to come out of the client’s mouth were “I really hope this isn’t about PAW Patrol. My kids and I can’t stand that show!”. She hadn’t even reached her seat by the time these words permeated the anxious air, now rapidly filling the room. PAW Patrol took up at least 50% of the presentation and the room was undeniably covered in puppy paraphernalia.
We persisted with awkward introductions but before long we were dealt our second blow.
The front page of the presentation was on the big screen and to showcase the ways we could seamlessly integrate our brands, we’d very tastefully introduced some slime to their logo and suffice to say it was not well received.
Following a taut talking to about brand integrity which revealed the client was also mid-way through a confidential rebrand which emphasized the importance of clean and simple, and knowing full well there were more creative “brand integration” surprises inside the deck, my colleague leading the meeting made the wise decision to skip the preso entirely in favour of a more “fluid discussion” and instead turned the meeting into a live Q&A to determine just how much grafting we’d need to do to get this across the line. In what felt like a decade that we were in that room, not one other person spoke.
With our tails between our legs, we silently filed out of the room of horrors that day and for the weeks following the team worked tirelessly to massage the approach. In the end, with enough ‘pivots’ to make anyone dizzy, the team finally got the pitch across the line and the campaign turned out to be a raging success. We sold through just about all our promoted products and saw sharp spikes in our brand and content engagement throughout the period delivering overall, against our objectives.
The key takeaway from all this? Always know your audience.
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