Lucian’s blog

It was back in 1840, with the launch of a postal service that promised to deliver a letter anywhere in the country for a penny, that the first of this country’s social media really took off.

As the volume of private correspondence grew at an astonishing rate, the new phenomenon gave advertisers plenty to think about.  Organisations that had happily confined their media selections to newspapers and stage-coach seatbacks quickly came under pressure:  did they have a social media strategy?  What were they doing to make the most of the post?

At first, I suspect, the aim may well have been to persuade letter-writers to take on the additional role of delivering advertising messages.  This must have seemed an extremely attractive option to the advertisers, not least because it wouldn’t cost them anything.  If they could provide letter-writers with amusing “viral” content about Pears Soap or Beecham’s Pills or whatever early Victorian brands existed in those distant days, then the word would spread like wildfire among the corresponding classes - while, most wonderfully, budgets could be slashed to the bone.

In the event, the experience of the following 170 years shows that it didn’t really work out quite like that.  Letter-writers carried on writing letters to each other, or at least until the technology was successively superseded by phone, email and text.  But they never really made more than the odd passing comment about Pears Soap or Beecham’s Pills:  irritatingly, they preferred to write and read about things that actually mattered to them, rather than things that mattered to an advertiser with a social media strategy.

Which didn’t at all mean that advertisers failed to find their own uses for this powerful new medium.  They did.  From the Victorian age to the present day, they’ve poured billions and billions of pounds into their own, parallel stream of commercial correspondence, and often their activities have achieved excellent results for them.

But for those who now believe that smart advertisers can encroach seamlessly and organically into today’s generation of social media, enjoyed and appreciated by users and integrated enthusiastically into their own personal communications, it must be a bit depressing to remember that over the years, the medium invented by their predecessors has invariably become known as “junk mail.”

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You’ve probably noticed that the Tesco colour print campaign is back for a second wave, and you may well also have noticed the two significant changes since the first wave:

-  much less amusing headlines;

-  addition of a hundred words or so of body copy.

There’s a story about a young copywriter asking some creative legend or other how long the copy should be in advertisements, and the legend answering “Long enough.”   I do appreciate that for the author of this blog to criticise the length of a piece of copy is about as pot/kettle as it gets.  But in the Tesco second wave, much as I regret the new-style boring headlines, I regret the intrusion of pieces of copy a hundred words longer than they need to be even more.

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In recent weeks, I seem to have been writing myself into a new role as a sceptic about the commercial potential of social media.  I’m not at all sure why I’m doing this:  it’s a role that’s very largely at odds with what I really believe.  In fact, I’ve been saying for a couple of years or more that a) probably the single most important thing about the Internet is the way it enables people to communicate sideways with each other and to form themselves into “communities” of one sort or another, and b) this aspect creates enormous opportunities for financial services providers, who need to think hard, and fast, about what they should be doing about it.

But it’s not the conceptual arguments that I’m sceptical about.  What I’m sceptical about is the extent to which brands, and their marketing and communications activities, are likely to penetrate online social media which exist, and succeed, for quite different purposes.

Yes, it is possible to come up with amusing and entertaining ideas that can go quite spectacularly viral, whether it’s Evian’s dancing babies on YouTube or Aleksandr the meerkat’s fan club on Facebook.  And it may be possible - although harder - to “monetise” these ideas (not the world’s most elegant verb):  the dancing babies allegedly did wonders for Evian sales, although they say the meerkat-loving kids and teenagers in Aleksandr’s fan club are way off-demographic for comparethemarket.com’s customer acquisition purposes.

But anyway, despite these and many other high-profile forays, I still think that users’ willingness to allow brands and marketers to colonise their social media is likely to remain distinctly limited.  Certainly they will allow some brands to become part of the social media landscape, but only a very small number which are behaving in an exceptionally engaging and entertaining way.  At any one time, the overwhelming majority just won’t be doing anything interesting enough to earn much attention or support.

For example, I’ve heard several times in conference presentations recently that everyone with any responsibility for any brand should regularly search brandname#fail on Twitter, to check out the level of flak tweets it’s taking.  But the truth is that in financial services, searching on the very biggest names in banking reveals mere handfuls of negative and mainly incomprehensible tweets, while searching on other names - even big ones like Direct Line or JP Morgan - reveals nothing at all.

Similarly, if you search a financial brand name on Facebook, you may well find a surprisingly long list of mentions:  but on closer examination you’ll find that all, or nearly all, are entirely uninteresting and innocuous.  Search BUPA, for example, and you’ll find 7,800 listings.  But as far as I can see (I haven’t clicked on all of them…) 98% of the time the name only appears within people’s biographical details, as a current or past employer. 

This may all change.  People enduring any kind of bad experience from a financial services provider may launch immediately into vituperative tweeting.  Large groups may form on Facebook dedicated to vigorous discussion of cash ISA rates.  (At the moment, possibly as a result of poor searching technique, I can’t find anything for ISA or SIPP on Facebook at all.)

But I must say, I doubt it.  All the evidence from elsewhere in the world is that brands are allowed into people’s personal spaces, but only to a limited extent and only on terms that are acceptable to the people occupying the spaces.   Somewhat reluctantly, we accept advertising on television and radio, but have always been uncomfortable with overly blatant forms of product placement;  we don’t object to beer mats in the pub, but might be a bit surprised to find sample packs of washing powder on the tables;  we expect to see perimeter advertising at football grounds, but wouldn’t like to see our team’s captain pick up a microphone and deliver a message about, say, an aftershave brand before kick-off.

In the same way, it seems to me that we’d quickly become very unhappy if,  whenever we logged on to Facebook or Twitter, we found a seething hubbub of brands jostling so noisily for our attention that we could barely discern the presence of the friends and family members we actually went there to engage with.  (In fact, on Facebook, I’ve recently Removed As Friends a couple of organisations that I decided I was hearing from altogether a bit too often:  I could hardly find anything from anyone I actually knew among the endless blizzard of messages from the organisers of the Marciac Jazz Festival.)

In short, I think that if commercial organisations want to use online networking for their own purposes, on the whole they’ll need to set up their own networks and communities rather than hijack ones that people have built for other reasons.  There’s huge potential for this - still very largely untapped - in financial services.  When there’s a financial issue on my mind, I’d be delighted to be able to go somewhere to talk about it with other people in the same position.  But that’s a million miles away from believing that writing, or reading, daily tweets on the same subject will ever become part of my routine.

OK, OK, it’s a fair cop, I’ve no idea how any of these things are going to develop.  Anything I say on the subject is almost certain to be wrong.  

But, at least as far as social media are concerned, I’d like to think perhaps no wronger than anyone else.

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Big day for me yesterday.  A few months ago my friends at that admirable organisation The Financial Services Forum (www.thefsforum.co.uk) asked me to set up another in their family of Special Interest Groups, this one to concentrate on brand strategy, and yesterday was the group’s first event.  The title was Just How Different and Special Are Financial Services Brands?, and we had three excellent speakers addressing the question from three different angles:  Mike Hoban outlining some of the key issues involved in building brands in non-financial service markets (airlines, retail and so forth);  Tim Pile doing the same with a focus on fast-moving consumer goods;  and Justin Basini concentrating on financial services.  We continued this compare-and-contrast format in a good hour of discussion with the 100 or so people who turned up.

I must say, it all seemed to go very well, and as chairman of the proceedings I was extremely grateful to the three speakers who all did make excellent presentations and, equally important, didn’t over-run - and also to all those attending, who kept up a steady flow of questions and comments and spared me from any trace of anxiety about the whole session drying up and coming to an embarrassing close half an hour early.

Anyway, it seemed important to try to fabricate some conclusions from the discussion, so at the end I asked for some shows of hands - particularly on the question of whether building brands in financial services is a) harder than, and b) different from, building brands in FMCG or in non-financial services.

When it came to the comparison with FMCG, absolutely everyone thought financial services are harder and over 95% thought they’re different. And when it came to the comparison with non-financial services, everyone thought financial services are harder or equally hard, and about two-thirds of those voting thought they were different.

I was pleased with these results.  Way back in my early days as an FS specialist, I used to go on about all this a lot - in fact, I think I may even have once written an agency brochure on the subject called Not Like Baked Beans, my not-so-hidden agenda obviously being to discourage clients from being irrelevantly seduced by non-specialist agencies’ work for other clients in other markets.

After a while, I got bored, partly because almost everything gets boring after a while but also because clients paid this line of argument no attention whatsoever.   Still, with definitive and quantitative new evidence available, maybe I should summon up some new enthusiasm and try to relaunch the whole issue.  I could hardly be less successful with it than I was last time.

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I’ve written more than once before now about the knock-on effects of Aleksandr the Meerkat, and the way that he’s had all the other major price comparison sites rushing about like headless chickens looking for campaign ideas of their own that can create as much engagement as he does.

With the three biggest rivals now well into their own meerkat-fighting responses, the dust has now settled and we can see how things have turned out.

There are in fact no headless chickens - the closest that we had, the call-centre chickens in Swiftcover’s “no clucking call-centres” campaign were replaced some while ago, in an unexpected move, by Iggy Pop.

But elsewhere, to sum up, GoCompare’s GioCompario campaign is absolutely horrible, but probably reasonably effective;  Moneysupermarket’s Omid Djalili campaign is solid and reasonably likeable, but suffers from cripplingly weak brand attribution;  and Confused.com’s “save a pair of jeans” campaign is a total misfire, not making sense at any level.

All in all, the meerkat’s supremacy remains unchallenged, although as I’ve also written before on this blog it’s a bit disappointing, considering just how supreme he does remain, to find that in fact comparethemarket.com is still only the No.4 price comparison site, with a market share less than a quarter of Moneysupermarket’s and less than half of GoCompare’s and Confused.com’s.

Framing an agency pitch brief, or indeed an agency pitch, purely as a response to a single named competitor is, of course, a recipe for disaster.  All that happens is that people’s frame of reference shrinks down to a single focus, so that they lose all sense of what an idea’s overall strengths and weaknesses may be and see it only in terms of how it compares to what that named competitor is doing.

You’ve heard me mention the example of Direct Line before, and the way that I personally have been briefed at least a dozen times over the years - maybe more like two dozen - to come up with an equivalent of that wretched red phone on wheels.   Over the years, there has been one surprisingly effective outcome from this brief - Churchill’s nodding back-shelf dog - but also a lot of toe-curling misfires (Admiral’s admiral, Elephant’s elephant, Hastings’s warrior, eSure’s mouse, Lombard Direct’s blue phone etc etc).

It’s funny the way that sometimes, a campaign from one brand in a category defines the catgeory so perfectly that whether they want to or not, its competitor brands can’t help thinking of it as the benchmark against which their own efforts must be measured.  I can remember this happening in health insurance with BUPA’s “You’re Amazing” campaign;  in credit cards with Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign;  in roadside resue with the AA’s “4th Emergency Service;” and, longer ago, with great classics like Heineken’s “refreshes the parts” and Benson & Hedges’ surreal gold pack shots.

For these benchmarking-setting campaigns, this situation represents a double victory - success in their own right, and a copycat obsession that dooms rivals to failure.  And to the list above, it seems we can now add comparethemarket.com - both for its success in its own right, and for that damaging copymeerkat obsession that it’s set off among its rivals.

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Some - well, actually, many - would say that banking has been more than interesting enough for the last couple of years.  But not those of us involved in brand, marketing and communications.

For us, it’s been extremely dull.  It’s been a long time now since the new-wave banks of the 80s and early 90s ran out of interestingness and reverted to type:  First Direct’s wild and wacky launch advertising is 20 years ago now;  Egg curdled overnight when it was bought by Citi, and turned from consistently the most interesting organisation in the market into the grimmest and most cynical;  and I’m not quite sure what happened to the likes of Smile and Cahoot.

At the same time, any tiny flickers of interestingness have been extinguished from the advertising and marketing campaigns of the big High Street players.  Howard riding on the back of a giant swan seems like Citizen Kane compared to Halifax’s current desperate radio-station commercials.  NatWest’s advertising isn’t even interesting hateful any more, it’s just deadly dull.  I’ve written dubiously about The World’s Local Bank before, but even if you accept it as a high-level brand strategy you have to admit it doesn’t give you anywhere sensible to go when you’re trying to promote a competitive cash ISA.   Who else?  Barclays?  Lloyds’ sad little people?  Santander?  Pleeeease.

It could hardly get worse.  But actually, it looks as if it might get better.  There’s a flurry of new activity at the niche end of the spectrum, with my good friend Anthony Thomson and his Metro Back currently closest to the starting line, and Mr Branson and Mr Leahy marshalling what I suspect may be rather greater firepower and entering the fray a little later.  And even among the big players, I’m intrigued by the piece in this week’s Marketing about HSBC betting the ranch on a range of “sub-brands,”which in a conference presentation only a couple of weeks ago were being described rather evasively as “propositions” by the HSBC speaker.  And then there’s this rather confusing story (well, to me anyway) about other big High Street banks (NatWest?  Northern Rock?) shedding some of their networks and - have I got this completely wrong  - bringing back the Williams & Glyns name.

Well, it’s not the longest list I ever wrote - and not the most definitive, either, tailing off into confused speculation at the end.  But at least it’s something.  I suspect that if there is a new burst of banking interestingness it may very likely have more to do with innovative marketing than off-the-wall advertising - in these troubled times I fear that many consumers would rather stay on the wall than leap off it.  But I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d be grateful for any new signs of life in this benighted sector.

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No big deal, this.  But I guess that when I walked past Saatchis’ offices in Charlotte St the other day, it must have been the day they were pitching to the owners of the west London shopping centre Westfield, or possibly the day they heard they’d won it, because their windows were full of a Westfield-related graphic.

It was a simple idea:  dozens of normal-sized Westfield carrier bags, together with some others carrying the Saatchi strapline “Nothing Is Impossible”, all funnelling into a giant Saatchi & Saatchi-branded carrier bag at the centre of the display.  As far as I can remember, there weren’t any other words involved.

A nice simple idea, you might say:  Saatchis “bagging” the Westfield account.  But, at risk of thinking about it too hard, isn’t there a trace of good old-fashioned big agency arrogance at work here?  It’s a question of who’s bagging who, or even whom:  has Saatchis bagged Westfield, or has Westfield chosen Saatchis?  It’s both, of course. But if I was the Westfield marketing director, and I saw my little normal-sized carrier bags being swallowed up in the maw of the giant Saatchi bag, I think I might wonder who’s going to be calling the shots in my shiny new agency relationship.

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There’s a campaign running at the moment for the stockbrokers (or wealth managers, as they probably call themselves these days) Brewin Dolphin.  Executionally it’s not bad, in a classy-but-somewhat-dull-and-recessive way.  But it’s the proposition that bothers me.

Basically, all the ads are all about the huge amount of time and effort that the company wants to put into getting to know me before it starts doing any wealth managing on my behalf.  To me, I have to say, this is a proposition that seems unwelcome and unnecessary in equal measure.

I’m a very busy person with far too many meetings in my diary and a poor work/life balance.  Sitting down for interminable getting-to-know-you sessions with a pinstriped Rupert is just about my last idea of fun. 

But I suppose I’d be reluctantly willing if I could imagine what on earth is likely to emerge from these discussions.  My investment needs can be summed up in 30 seconds:  over the years I haven’t put away enough for my retirement, and therefore a) I’m keen that my money should grow as much as possible to make up the deficit, but b) I can’t afford to lose a lot of it trying.  (The fact that these two requirements are entirely incompatible is basically the challenge for any chosen wealth manager to rise to.)

In having these rather contradictory needs, I have no doubt that I’m typical of thousands of other people, and therefore that the investment solution that’ll suit me best will be the same as thousands of other people’s.  Rupert can chat away with me for as long as he likes, but I don’t think he’s going to find anything more interesting or distinctive to inform my investment brief.  In fact, I can’t really imagine what interesting or distinctive discoveries there could be.  I suppose maybe a commitment to ethical investing, say.  Or, I don’t know, some personal history that leads to a profound reluctance to invest in Korea.  But even if I did possess some personal idiosyncracies of this kind, I’m sure they’d emerge in 15 minutes.  I can’t envisage Rupert triumphantly dragging them to the surface two hours into our eighth working session, like an angler finally landing the one trout from the pond.

This issue - the sheer routine ordinariness of most of our financial needs - seems to me to raise a big issue not just with this one slightly second-rate advertising campaign, but also with very large parts of the whole world of “wealth management” and financial advice.  Yes, certainly, a few very rich people with complicated personal lives do need sophisticated strategies to minimise tax, keep money out of the hands of ex-spouses and so forth.  But for the huge majority of us, it’s all childishly simple - and the only real dilemmas are ones that no adviser can solve for us anyway, like for example given the inadequacy of our resources is it better to underfund our pensions, our life assurance or our short term savings.

As I’ve written before in this blog, the only reason why most of us need all this tiresome and expensive individual service is that the whole industry has been built to be operated like that.  Like a restaurant without a self-service counter, which would surely degenerate into chaos if all the diners turned up in the kitchen demanding their chosen dishes directly from the chefs, it can’t currently work in any other way.  But spend a bit of time and money on building a decent self-service counter and it’s a different story:  and if a chef with a proper palate flinches at the sight of customers spooning parmesan onto their spaghetti vongole, it doesn’t really matter and no-one’s going to die.

I suppose that in the end, like about two-thirds of the entries in this blog, the point is ultimately no more and no less interesting than a single three-word observation:  all markets segment.   For everyone who, like me, is mystified and alienated by Brewin Dolphin’s advertising, there’s someone else who can’t wait to book up those interminable meetings.  And, as I’ve said myself a million times, it’s better to turn on 20% of your market and turn off 80% than to be greeted with indifference by the whole lot of them.

Still, if a wealth manager wants a positive response from me to an advertising campaign, they’d do much better to emphasise how little they want to talk to me.

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Went to a conference about bank branding recently, and hated it.  The whole event felt, oddly, like a gathering of medieval physicians discussing the latest thinking on the medical use of leeches:  earnest, intense, full of zeal and certainty, but actually - as subsequent events would prove - about 95% wrong.

The keynote speaker was someone responsible for a very large bank’s global brand strategy.  She made a very odd presentation, falling basically into two halves.

In the first half, she explained how a close study of the international branding strategies available had convinced her that a single global master brand was the right option for her bank.  She explained how her thinking had been influenced by other best-of-breed global brands:  McDonald’s, BMW and Coca-Cola were three that she cited approvingly.

In the second half, she went on to explain how, beneath her global master brand, the bank now catered for its target markets’ needs by means of five segmented “propositions” - individually named and promoted packages of services relevant to each of the five groups.  She focused on two, the upmarket package for older and more affluent people, and the package for younger customers earlier in their careers.  Of the other three, one is for small businesses, one is for big businesses and I don’t know anything about the fifth.

I must say, I can’t decide which half of the presentation I found harder to understand. 

 In the first half, it seemed to me that her analysis of these “global master brands” was simply wrong.  Although McDonald’s, BMW and Coke are all extremely strong brands, I wouldn’t say that any of them stand alone by any means as monolithic master brands.  I’d say that McDonald’s has quite clearly and deliberately developed a growing range of sub-brands, connecting either to products (Big Mac) or to packages (Happy Meals) or to other elements of their iconography (the bizarre and frightening Ronald McDonald).  I’d say that although BMW products have boring names, to their target markets these are product brand identities rich in rational and emotional engagement:  for any petrol-head the simple prefix “M” - as in M3 and M5 - says everything that needs to be said about the high-performance variant of BMW’s saloons, and actually to those who know and care about such things the difference between, say, 316 and 335 is all the difference in the world.   

But the oddest of her three examples is undoubtedly Coca-Cola.  Within the Coke family, it seems to me that the company is trying to create at least one distinct sub-brand, Coke Zero, and probably more.  But much more importantly, the Coca-Cola Corporation has a whole range of other brands in its portfolio, including Sprite, Dr Pepper, Fanta, Powerade and Malvern mineral water, among many others.  Corporately, Coca-Cola absolutely isn’t a master-brander at all:  it sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, as a leading proponent of the “brand portfolio” or “house of brands” approach.

So by the time the presentation moved into its second half, I was already struggling with the speaker’s argument.  But, if anything, I found the second part even more difficult to understand.  First and foremost, I simply couldn’t understand how the separately-named, discretely-targeted, individually-promoted “propositions” that she spoke about were anything other than brands under another name.  OK, a bit like BMWs, they have fairly bland and generic sounding names, and their individual look and feel (including the typography) fits within the brand’s overall visual identity (as indeed do BMW’s).  But to say that as a result these things are not “brands” seems to me to make a complete nonsense of what the word “brand” actually means.

There was another aspect of this second part of the talk that bothered me, which was how on earth a huge global bank can respond to the needs of all of its customers with just five “propositions.”  Thinking about the range of things that the bank can do for just one customer - take, for the sake of argument, me - I’d have thought you’d have needed dozens of “propositions”, or whatever you want to call them, just to respond to my needs alone.

And in fact, it was pondering this apparently unsustainable idea - that five propositions can cover the entire global waterfront - that gave me a vague sense of a possible explanation for the whole presentation’s line of thought.

Like everyone addressing this kind of topic, the speaker had several slides designed to show us how, until quite recently, the approach to branding and sub-branding around the world had been chaotic, and not in a good way.  There was a huge amount of pointless, unnecessary and expensive complication, contradiction and duplication of resources.  Any cost-conscious senior manager looking at the slides showing the logos of literally hundreds of business unit, product and service sub-brands from all corners of the world would itch to cut a swathe through it all, creating order out of total chaos. 

And what’s the best way to tackle the problems of extreme complication?  To oppose them with an approach that’s based on extreme simplicity.  You’re not going to be able to dispose of the hundreds or even thousands of sub-brands championed by various groups of people in parts of the group by being nice, and reasonable, and suggesting that perhaps you should meet half-way.  You’re going to have to be completely unreasonable - you need to adopt a position that makes no sense, maintain complete and selective blindness to its obvious unsustainability and refuse to engage in any kind of discussion about it.

It seems the strategy has worked.  Worldwide, the bank has now discarded many, many hundreds of sub-brand identities (even though I don’t actually believe that it’s been able to replace them with just five “propositions.”)  Sometimes, in corporate life as elsewhere, it’s the unreasonable person who gets things done.  Fair enough.  But I must say, the unreasonable person may not be the best choice to make sense of it all in a conference presentation.

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Moneysupermarket and its agency, MCBD, must be disappointed by the lukewarm reaction to their new Omid Djalili campaign.  I think I know what’s gone wrong:  they’ve made what’s usually (though not always), a mistake, and gone ahead and shot the script that MCBD presented in the pitch.

I guess there’s some empirical evidence for this, in that the pitch wasn’t very long ago and here’s the film already, but actually it’s the nature of the execution itself that arouses my suspicions.

When you’re pitching, you’re under huge pressure of time, and you have to cut corners somewhere.  If you think of the creative development process as basically a game of three halves - developing a nice strong original insight, coming up with a big idea and then, usually, showing how it can play out across an integrated campaign - then at least one of those halves is going to get a lot less than a third of the time available, if you see what I mean.

The new campaign has been congratulated for its insight - namely, that we Brits don’t like to haggle.  It may well have taken some time to get there.  If I then had the responsibility of taking this insight forward into a TV execution, and only had a week, say, or indeed a day, or even possibly an hour, to do so, I would write a script with a presenter in it, because they’re the easiest when there’s quite a lot to say and nothing much to look at;  I’d choose a comedian as my presenter, because what else can you do except try to be funny;   and I’d look for a comedian from a culture where we think people are good at haggling, so that he can act as a sort of ironic contrast to us hopeless Brits.

I don’t think anyone actually knows exactly where Omid Djalili comes from, and if they knew he was from Iran I’m not sure if that would connect perfectly with the haggling thing (aren’t they more about ayatollahs, nuclear weapons and stoning adulterers?).  But hey, he’s some kind of Middle East guy and they all haggle over there - remember the gourd-buying scene in Life of Brian?

Anyway, hey presto, a TV script, and hopefully the pitch timetable is back on track.  (What we can’t tell at this stage is how much time there was left to think through the whole campaignability/integration issue:  will future executions feature more of  Omid Djalili, for example, or will the campaign include other celebs from perceived haggling cultures like maybe Zinedine Zidane and King Abdullah of Jordan?   And what will happen in print, online and other media?  Will small-space mono press ads feature small and blurry photos of Omid, who at that size and resolution will look pretty much indistinguishable from Alexei Sayle?  Or will the strapline A Great Deal Easier - more than a little uncomfortably close to Direct Line’s A Great Deal Better, I’d say - act as a focal point for a much looser kind of integration?  We just don’t know.) 

We also don’t know if I’m right to build this tottering tower of speculation about what happened in the pitch process, and subsequently.  But what we do know is that nine times out of ten, for all the talk of selecting the right firm, and the right team, for a long-term business partnership, pitches are in fact painting competitions where the clients will choose the agency that comes up with the idea closest to what they think they’re looking for.

Nevertheless, very often, things happen subsequently which send the agency back to the drawing board - the idea researches badly, the Chairman doesn’t like it, it’ll cost too much to shoot, the brief changes, whatever.  But occasionally, the pitch work slips straight through into a finished execution without touching the sides.  And while it will occasionally be brilliant, more often than not it’ll have that moneysupermarket-like slightly-half-baked air.

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