Five factors making (or breaking) an agency pitch

SEPTEMBER 25, 2023 BY CAMPAIGN

—The industry has evolved almost beyond recognition in recent years, but the key to success for ad agencies hasn’t changed much since the 1960s. It is still about pitching and winning, says The Go! Network’s Russell Oakley—

Manchester-based marketing intermediary and pitch consultancy The GO! Network recently collected and analyzed feedback provided by in-house teams from more than 250 chemistry calls and pitches to identify the key factors influencing prospective agency partners’ decisions.

The aim of the research was to offer agencies a deeper understanding of what marketing teams are looking for in a pitch, and to give the marketing teams a chance to talk about their experiences.

The data highlighted the following five recurring factors:

Chemistry is fundamental

Looking at the specific negatives outlined by client teams in relation to unsuccessful pitches, a lack of chemistry or an “off-putting” approach came up in 20.5% of cases.

Whether the feedback suggested that the agency appeared uninterested in working for the brand, or had been overly critical of the brand and the brief without providing a clear justification, chemistry is consistently crucial.

On the other side, 50% of client teams said one of their reasons for picking an agency was because it was a good fit culturally and personality-wise.

Demonstrating genuine interest, intrigue and understanding of the client’s business, industry, current situation, reason for the agency pitch and objectives lands well with the client on almost every pitch.

Ultimately, an open approach, engaged attitude and overall enthusiasm about the brand can make all the difference, particularly in the formative stages of the process.

Everyone involved in the pitch needs to have a role to play

Consistently, brands emphasize their desire to engage with the individuals who will directly manage their accounts, valuing genuine chemistry over grand visions presented by higher-level executives parachuted in solely for pitches.

One of the biggest reasons for rejecting an agency after a chemistry call, mentioned by 28.3% of clients, was when a senior contact such as the managing director or the founder was seen as “overwhelming the call.”

While many respondents said they appreciated the presence of senior leadership, demonstrating the value of the potential client in the agency’s eyes, many were concerned that more junior teams or delivery team members were not allowed to add anything.

In addition, 15% of client teams said that not being introduced to the agency contacts who were genuinely going to be working on the project day-to-day was an issue in unsuccessful pitches.

Once the optimal pitch team is assembled, a client-friendly approach thrives when roles are clearly defined. Assigning specific topics aligns each speaker’s expertise with their segment, enhancing clarity and preventing the disruption of simultaneous voices or undue influence based on seniority.

A deeper understanding of the brand and its challenges is key

In relation to pitches, 75% of client teams said the winning agency had shown a true understanding of the business or brand.

Agencies, at times, hasten to prove their expertise. Nonetheless, particularly in the initial stages, showcasing their grasp and insight is pivotal in giving the client a base layer of confidence, providing a springboard to delve into the agency’s experience, capabilities and ways of working further.

Among positive factors mentioned following successful chemistry calls, 24.6% of respondents highlighted the agency having “clearly done research,” and 27.7% said the pitching agency had shown authentic enthusiasm for the brand.

Asking questions, offering solutions and bringing new potential challenges to light were also flagged as positives in almost 50% of successful pitches, particularly during initial chemistry calls.

Practical challenges, such as capacity, resource or budget

At GO!, we will always try to advise clients on their budgets and give them realistic expectations of what they can expect to get for that budget. However, this often doesn’t deter agencies from challenging these budgets during a pitch.

According to the research, issues with commercials and affordability came up in around 18% of all unsuccessful pitch feedback.

The only time I would suggest agencies do this is if they are proposing a payment plan or increased budget that clearly demonstrates additional value for the client, and that it is being proposed only as an alternative to give the client greater efficiency, or value in the longer term.

It doesn’t have to end with the pitch

Almost half of the brands said they were interested in maintaining a future relationship with agencies that didn’t win the pitch, as long as those agencies had impressed them in two critical areas: building a positive chemistry, and demonstrating their interest in the brand.

If agencies have done the necessary due diligence and prequalification of a brief, and have decided to enter into the process willingly and know it is competitive, then having a firm understanding that in the worst-case scenario it might not go your way will always come across well with clients.

This is why the feedback we deliver to agencies who pitch through GO! always comes directly from the client, delivered in their own words.

Our processes allow and encourage clients to be as thorough and constructive as they can in feedback.

Whether agencies agree with this feedback is often subjective, but embracing this feedback and then considering how they can leave the process with the best possible opportunity of a future relationship with the client is something we encourage agencies to do.

How to Grow With Short-form Video

 by Alex Garcia

Video content is a major focus for me in Q4 of this year and going into 2024.

I’ve started playing around with some videos that I’ve posted on Twitter. I also had a couple of YouTube channels in a different niche a while back. But I’m a bit rusty.

I’m also totally clueless when it comes to short-form video.

My friend Alex Garcia (insanely talented marketer) wrote a guide on how to win with short-form in his newsletter. One of the few pieces of content I actually read and bookmarked last week.

A few highlights:

Think In Slack Groups

“When Oren makes a video, he thinks about what will get shared in a work Slack channel.

Which is two main metrics: Saves & Shares

Video saves equal content so valuable you want to come back to it.

Video shares equal content so valuable you want others to know too.”

Content Funnels

“Our content strategy focused around top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, and bottom-of-funnel content.

And we categorized it like this:

• Top of funnel = Content that has a wide reach
• Middle of funnel = Content that's valuable but includes product placements
• Bottom of funnel = Content that drives a specific action

The volume shifted based on our goal that quarter. But usually, the split was 60% TOF, 30% MOF, and 10% BOF.”

Alex also told me that him, Oren John, and Colin Landforce (this is a serious power team) are running a cohort-based course on how to grow with short-form video in October. I’m in.

This isn't sponsored btw. I would have plugged this piece and resource regardless. If you want to learn short-form video strategy, check it out right here.

Elon Musk's 'Algorithm,' a 5-Step Process to Dramatically Improve Nearly Anything

Elon Musk's 'Algorithm,' a 5-Step Process to Dramatically Improve Nearly Anything, Is Both Simple and BrilliantJust make sure you follow the steps in order.

Elon Musk calls it "the algorithm," a distillation of lessons learned while relentlessly increasing production capacity at Tesla's Nevada and Fremont factories.

According to Walter Isaacson in his new book Elon Musk, there is a "nontrivial chance" that Musk will trot out the algorithm during any given production meeting.

"I became a broken record on the algorithm," Musk says. "But I think it's helpful to say it to an annoying degree." 

The next time you're trying to be more efficient and effective, whether professionally or personally, give Musk's algorithm a try. Just make sure you complete each step in order. (Sections below in italics are from Isaacson's book, quoting Musk.)

1. Question every requirement.

Each should come with the name of the person who made it. You should never accept that a rqeuirement came from a department, such as the "legal department" or the "safety department." You need to know the name of the real person who made that requirement. Then you should question it, no matter how smart that person is. Requirements from smart people are the most dangerous, because people are less likely to question them. Always do so, even if the requirement came from me.

Then make the requirements less dumb.

When I took over manufacturing at a new plant, supervisors had to sign off on quality before a production line could start up. The crews often waited five or ten minutes for a supervisor to be found. (Which was another problem that needed to be solved; leaders should be on the floor, not in offices.) 

Why? The CEO of the company had established the rule after one expensive mistake. But if operators couldn't be trusted to know whether their work met quality standards, they shouldn't be operators. 

Many blanket requirements are based on a one-off event that didn't require a process, guideline, or rule in response. Instead, just deal with the specific situation.

Learn from it -- but don't respond by creating a box everyone must forever fit inside.

2. Delete any part or process you can.

You may have to add them back later. In fact, if you do not end up adding back at least 10 percent of them, then you didn't delete enough.

When I first became a supervisor, one of my jobs was to prepare, print, and deliver a daily report to 20 or so people. The whole process took over an hour. One day I wondered whether anyone actually read the report, so I created it but didn't print or deliver.

No one noticed.

So I stopped delivering a few other reports. Created them, but didn't deliver them. No one noticed.

Often we do things simply because we've always done them. Or because we think we need to. Or because it's our job, and therefore it must be important. (Everything about our jobs is important, right?)

3. Simpify and optimize.

This should come after step two. A common mistake is to simplify and optimize a part or process that should not exist.

A couple weeks after I'd stopped delivering those reports, I asked a few people if they needed me to start delivering them again. Nope. Then I asked if we still needed to collect the data involved. In most cases we didn't, because it was already being collected elsewhere. (My department had been doing double work because we didn't think we could trust other departments to get it right.) 

In a few cases, we did need occasionally need certain data, so I found a way to automate the collection process. And I found a way for production crews to not be involved in the collection process, which meant they could spend more time producing and less time serving as data entry clerks.

As you'll see in a moment, make sure you don't automate or optimize a process that doesn't need to exist in the first place. Sure, you can make percentage gains by making something better, but why not save 100 percent of the time, effort, and cost involved in an unneccessary process by eliminating it altogether?

4. Accelerate cycle time.

Every process can be speeded up. But only do this after you have followed the first three steps. In the Tesla factory, I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted.

At my old job, we constantly worked to wring time out of job changeovers; the faster we could switch from job to job, the more units we produced per day. In simple terms, the two major ways to increase productivity are to speed up the rate of production (think increasing the miles per hour) and to speed up the time it takes to switch from producing one widget to another. 

We spent a ton of time trying to make a set of conveyor guides easier to adjust. A few seconds here, a few seconds there, until one day a junior operator said, "I don't see why we need to adjust them at all. If we change the shape a little, they'll work for any size product we run."

Turns out he was right; we were trying to accelerate a step that should have been removed altogether.

5. Automate.

That comes last. The big mistake in Nevada and at Fremont was that I began by trying to automate every step. We should have waited until all the requirements had been questioned, parts and processses deleted, and the bugs shaken out. 

After you've completed the first four steps, what's left -- the things you really need to do, that are truly important, that genuinely add value -- can then be optimized and automated. Get rid of all the fluff, and then make what's left as effective and efficient as it can be.

Although my former co-workers and I didn't realize it, we were loosely following Musk's algorithm at that job. But in our case, as in Musk's, we often made our lives more difficult by inadvertently skipping a step or two and having to go backwards. (Even so, over the course of ten months, we cut job changeover times in half.)

There are also a few corollaries to the algorithm. Here are a few of my favorites:

All technical managers must have hands-on experience. For example, managers of software teams must spend at least 20 percent of their time coding. Solar roof managers must spend time on the roofs, doing instalations.

Leaders with practical experience tend to make better leaders. (One study found that if your boss can do your job, you're more likely to be happy at work.)

It'sO K to be wrong. Just don't be confident and wrong.

Whenever there are problems to solve, don't go directly to your managers. Do a skip level, and meet with the level right below your managers. 

Often, the best decision you can make is deciding who should make certain decisions, and then empowering those people to make those decisions. Almost always, those people are at least one level further down the hierarchy than you think. 

The only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation.

Granted, you may not want to take that approach to extremes, but if you want to do something better, or faster, or cheaper -- or if you simply want to make your business or life better -- then you have to do things differently.

Because if you do what everyone else does, you can only accomplish what everyone else accomplishes.

5 ways to be a leader (even if you’re not the boss)

A common misconception is that to be a leader, you have to be the boss; this is simply untrue. While the terms are used interchangea­bly (admittedly by me as well), they aren’t the same thing because they entail different qualities. Not all leaders are bosses, and not all bosses are leaders. If mentioning this difference doesn’t spark an immediate flash of recognition about some of your former managers, you’ve been lucky.

True leaders exemplify integrity, and are not dishonest or bullies, and do not discriminate or harass. When they see this behavior in others, whether fellow leaders, their employees, or even their bosses, they do not tolerate it and they speak up to eliminate it. They risk whatever repercussions there may be, including even losing their jobs, in order to do what’s right.

Please do keep this concept front of mind as we explore the Five Ps.

The first of my Five Ps of Leadership—passion.

It’s crucial that a leader is passionate about what they do. Regardless of our work ethic, education, and experience, our company never would have gotten off the ground if we weren’t passionate about the notion of helping the world connect through translation. Without passion, we could never even have dreamed about all the hours we’d spend in the office. With every project we sold, no matter how small, we saw the purpose and value of our efforts. We enhanced other companies’ and people’s ability to communicate internationally, which allowed them to grow and diversify, saving everything from jobs to lives.

To be clear, I was able to work an obscene number of hours in the early days because it never felt like I was working. I felt like I was building a future, not just for myself but for the organizations that did business with us, as well as our employees. I sprang out of bed every morning, sometimes after only a couple of hours’ sleep, so excited that I had the privilege of waking up to what I was constructing.

Passion is the first of the Five Ps, but without the second P it’s just an inspirational saying that looks cute on a coffee mug. Prioritization is the second P because dreams and enthusiasm are not enough; you need solid goals and deadlines. The ability to prioritize is the alchemy that turns those dreams into gold.

Being able to prioritize time requires you to look inside yourself and understand your own productivity, because you can’t expect your team to be efficient if you yourself aren’t. For me, I know I’m happiest when I get an early start, even in my personal life, because I can lose motivation as the day goes on. When I set a goal, I make it the first thing I delve into in the morning, regardless of whether it’s working, reading, or exercising. If it’s important, I get it out of the way because I know I’ll feel better once it’s done. I figure out the metrics of whatever it is that I have to accomplish and then I hold myself accountable for completing the task.

As you advance in your leadership role, you’ll find that you have to delegate some of your decision-making. Regardless of how well you prioritize, it eventually becomes impossible to do it all yourself. The way to build a company is to make sure you eventually replace yourself; as you grow, you should transition to working on the business, rather than in the business.

The other half of the prioritization equation is prioritizing your expenditures. In the beginning, for every dollar you spend, make the highest percentage possible go toward sales and marketing, despite the fact that these are not “fun” buys. Above all, this means having the biggest and best sales team in the industry.

Once you figure out how to prioritize, everything will inevitably change, which brings us to the third P of leading—pivoting. The best leaders understand how important it is to be agile, whether they’re adjusting to a business shift or addressing a crisis.

The magic happens in the fourth P of leading—proactivity, which includes a culture of innovation.

Why do I consider proactivity to be magic? Because when you inspire your people to unleash their creativity, you not only increase employee satisfaction but you can also have a significant impact on your bottom line. In fact, companies where creativity is aligned with corporate culture have a 30% higher enterprise value growth and a 17% higher profit growth.

But what does it mean to be a company that proactively innovates?

Proactively innovating means not only encouraging employees to come to management with ideas but to reward them for doing so. I believed in holding innovation contests and we tied raises and promotions to producing new products and services. We did this by fostering an atmosphere where everyone felt comfortable offering suggestions, telling our employees that there were no bad ideas. We encouraged unorthodox thinking, and when we were presented with ideas we figured how we could make them work, rather than shooting them down, saying why they wouldn’t.

What differentiates a good employee from a great one is proac­tivity, so as a leader, you must encourage this trait. Proactivity is the difference between doing what you’re told and asking yourself what else you could be doing, whether it’s brainstorming a way to reduce errors or enhancing the clients’ experience. For example, my favorite managers were the ones who didn’t just send me what I requested, but instead proactively forwarded weekly or monthly updates about their team’s numbers and percentage toward goals.

Proactivity means that it’s everyone’s job to grow the company, and that can take many different shapes. Not coincidentally, our most proactive employees were the ones who earned the most promotions, bonuses, perks, and commissions.

The fifth P of Leadership can be the easiest facet, as well as the most difficult—people. Leadership boils down to getting others to get behind you in the pursuit of a goal. You can be a (somewhat less effective) leader without prioritization or proactivity or the ability to pivot or even passion, but without people, you’re just one person being effective all by yourself. Having people who believe in you and your vision is the most important part of being a leader. The caveat is, you must be a person of principle or your vision is just propaganda.

I agree with Google’s thinking that once you have the right people, you must get out of their way, but that starts with finding the right people. I specifically hired the kind of people who impressed me, who I thought were smarter than I was. I learned so much from them. Early on, I discovered that my success as a leader, and the company’s growth, would stem from having the best people on board. We were incredibly fortunate over the years to have hired so many of them.

My ideal employee was fresh out of college because these people were ready to be molded. I looked for those who were excited about the industry and our company. We found them in all the usual ways, from recruiting at colleges to placing ads in The New York Times and posting on job boards and, later, LinkedIn.

But how we recruited wasn’t nearly as important as who we brought on. We wanted those who sought an entrepreneurial experience. Working at the company was a first “real” job for many of our star performers. We found that we had the worst luck when we hired from our competitors, because these people didn’t have the same attitude as the new graduates. I’d take attitude, personality, and drive over experience any day of the week.

I found that the best way to lead these teams was to be with them. If they stayed late at the office, I was there with them, making sure we ordered pizza and later thanking them by buying them flowers or a gift card. I believe in recognizing employees by giving comp days and gifts for going above and beyond, and it was important to me that they’d know I’d never ask them to do anything I wouldn’t do myself.

My years of interviewing and hiring taught me to offer jobs only to those who shared my core values, which included the notion that it’s only arduous work if you’d rather be doing something else. My advice is to create an entire culture of like­-minded people, those who want to work hard and play hard, because that will bond you to each other and produce the best results. Of course their skills and their backgrounds should be different and diverse, complementing yours and those of the rest of the team. But their mindset and values should align with yours.

3 Strategic Questions Any Marketing Executive Should Answer

All marketing and business leaders understand the need for a strategy, but this vaunted exercise called strategy is elusive in practice.

Marketing teams often get stuck in reaction mode. But even if a marketing leader were to focus on strategy, where would she begin? At a high level, marketing strategy boils down to three questions: Are we telling a unique story that accentuates our competitive advantage? Are we connecting with our target audience? And do we have the measurement frameworks and technologies required to assess and optimize our efforts.

Tell a Unique Story

Most companies suffer from commoditization. Companies get lumped into categories (such as demand-side platforms or data-management platforms), and few customers can tell the difference.

One way to transcend commoditization is to obsess over product features. This doesn’t work for the majority of a company’s audience because it isn’t tangible enough to be memorable or capture their attention.

There are two better ways to earn customers’ attention. The first is focusing on customer pain points. For example, a customer data platform isn’t great because it has the most powerful technology for streamlining customer data, but because it uses that power to help marketers increase return on ad spend and drive cost-effective customer acquisition.

The second is aligning the power of your product with a movement, like environmentally sustainable advertising. This trendy appeal will draw in a wide audience, many of whom will then advocate for or buy the solution.

Distribute the Message

When you’ve established a differentiated story, it’s time to distribute it.

Actively engage influencers and prospects who will amplify your message. On social, make a list of 50 highly active users in your industry and engage with them directly. At events, give talks and host dinners on your big issue. Via PR, directly engage with reporters who cover your key topic.

Identifying a broad story that aligns with industry trends makes successful incursions into key channels much easier. When you have a story aligned with your industry’s direction, you have something genuinely interesting to talk to your audience about. You’re not just touting your own product’s benefits.

Measure the Impact

Ultimately, marketing is judged on its ability to drive sales opportunities. Marketing strategists can’t lose sight of this. They should buy or develop a dashboard that assesses their contributions to revenue.

But there’s a wide gap between customer touchpoints and sales qualified leads. So, marketers also need to establish leading indicators that show traction. On social, this might be followers in their target audience. With PR, it might be placements. These aren’t valuable in themselves, but they lead to value.

Marketers who have strategic hypotheses, act on them, and can measure and optimize those actions empower themselves to make a case for marketing to the rest of the leadership team. Tactics are how the work actually gets done. But it’s strategy that makes the work valuable and allows marketers to communicate that value.

Client Briefs, Campaign Performance: How Ad Agencies Are Using Generative AI Today

Changing old ways and finding new audiences

Agencies are increasingly tapping gen AI tools to reach new customers.guoya/iStock

Headshot of Trishla Ostwal

By Trishla Ostwal

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

Fine-tune your media, marketing and technology strategies at the Convergent TV Summit on October 25 with expert insights and strategies from the pros. Register now to save 35% on your pass.

Over the past eight months, the ad industry has witnessed a definitive role for generative AI inside creative and media agencies; from decoding client briefs to amassing real-time insights on campaign performance, gen AI is getting the job done more quickly and efficiently. 

Across IPG’s Momentum, S4 Capital’s Media.Monks and independent agency PMG, the opportunities presented by generative AI have led to accelerated ad campaign output and reaching new consumers and winning new business.

“We look at generative AI as a force multiplier in terms of our ability to react and respond to client needs,” said Jason Snyder, CTO of Momentum, an IPG agency.

According to a Gartner survey, nearly 63% of marketing leaders plan to invest in this technology in the next 24 months. In a landscape inundated with continuous AI-related developments, the practical applications are providing significant value for marketers and the agencies that support them.

Writing and decoding client briefs

At Momentum, the agency has created an operating system of sorts that employs a unified data model linking existing information with guidance on the next steps in their operations.

Innovation that gets closer to the customer and drives sales.

GENERATIVE AI IS MORE THAN A MARKETING GIMMICK FOR COCA-COLA

This process begins with understanding a client brief. When the agency receives a new brief, its AI tech stack swiftly identifies the most suitable people within the company to tackle it. A large language model (LLM) can extract insights from previous, similar campaigns to aid a response to the new brief.

This response includes what the creative output could look like, what the strategy is and what kind of target and segmentation works, according to Snyder.

Media.Monks, the S4 Capital agency, has taken a consultative approach distinct from the conventional ad agency workflow, where clients dispatch briefs and agencies respond accordingly.

The agency, through its open-source generative AI tools, is encouraging its brand partners’ marketing teams to reduce their reliance on manual processes when drafting briefs.

This means the generative AI taps into real-time signals from a brand’s first-party data across marketing channels which informs real-time variations in creative content, giving rise to new briefs crafted with the assistance of generative AI.

“That effectively is a flywheel that is running in the cloud that is enabled by artificial intelligence,” said Henry Cowling, Media.Monks’ chief innovation officer.

These creative variations have proven particularly beneficial for Media.Monks’ global automotive brand partner, with the delivery of region-specific content, based on micro-moments such as hour, date, location or real-time events taking place. This all led to increased brand relevance for the client, Cowling says.

Speed up ad optimization

At independent digital agency PMG, marketers can glean real-time data visualizations and campaign reports via a generative AI-powered augmented analytics tool called “Ask Alli” trained on data from vendor platforms, aggregated CDP and ecommerce insights.

Made available to the agency’s brand partners next week, marketers will be able to gain myriad campaign insights by posing queries such as “Can you show me the performance of TikTok vs. Snapchat vs. Meta for the past 7 days?” or “What are my best-performing audiences?”

In doing so, they can track their social budget’s pacing over the last month allowing them to make data-driven decisions, such as evaluating platform performance, identifying top-performing creatives and ensuring their ad spend aligns with monthly objectives.

This negates the need for an analytics or data engineering team to construct dashboards, pull reporting or spend time manually identifying and translating insights from data, said Chris Alvares, PMG’s head of technology.

Discover new audiences

Momentum’s AI tech stack, soon to be made client-facing, utilizes an extensive array of data sources including clients’ first-party data, third-party data and the agency’s proprietary research, which range from previous ads, target keywords, funnel data and demographic insights.

This enables precision segmentation that allows brand partners to target their desired audience.

For instance, consider a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) company launching a new product that diverges from its traditional offerings. While they may have a deep understanding of their existing customer, they lack information about the new category because of a lack of data and insights.

Through Momentum’s AI tech stack, these brands gain the capability to identify their potential new customers, determine effective channels for engagement and even create tailored content.

“This is where the generative AI tools become valuable in the realm of experiential marketing,” said Momentum’s Snyder.

 

Client Briefs, Campaign Performance: How Ad Agencies Are Using Generative AI Today

Changing old ways and finding new audiences

Agencies are increasingly tapping gen AI tools to reach new customers.guoya/iStock

By Trishla Ostwal

9 HOURS AGO

Fine-tune your media, marketing and technology strategies at the Convergent TV Summit on October 25 with expert insights and strategies from the pros. Register now to save 35% on your pass.

Over the past eight months, the ad industry has witnessed a definitive role for generative AI inside creative and media agencies; from decoding client briefs to amassing real-time insights on campaign performance, gen AI is getting the job done more quickly and efficiently.

Across IPG’s Momentum, S4 Capital’s Media.Monks and independent agency PMG, the opportunities presented by generative AI have led to accelerated ad campaign output and reaching new consumers and winning new business.

“We look at generative AI as a force multiplier in terms of our ability to react and respond to client needs,” said Jason Snyder, CTO of Momentum, an IPG agency.

According to a Gartner survey, nearly 63% of marketing leaders plan to invest in this technology in the next 24 months. In a landscape inundated with continuous AI-related developments, the practical applications are providing significant value for marketers and the agencies that support them.

Writing and decoding client briefs

At Momentum, the agency has created an operating system of sorts that employs a unified data model linking existing information with guidance on the next steps in their operations.

GENERATIVE AI IS MORE THAN A MARKETING GIMMICK FOR COCA-COLA

This process begins with understanding a client brief. When the agency receives a new brief, its AI tech stack swiftly identifies the most suitable people within the company to tackle it. A large language model (LLM) can extract insights from previous, similar campaigns to aid a response to the new brief.

This response includes what the creative output could look like, what the strategy is and what kind of target and segmentation works, according to Snyder.

Media.Monks, the S4 Capital agency, has taken a consultative approach distinct from the conventional ad agency workflow, where clients dispatch briefs and agencies respond accordingly.

The agency, through its open-source generative AI tools, is encouraging its brand partners’ marketing teams to reduce their reliance on manual processes when drafting briefs.

This means the generative AI taps into real-time signals from a brand’s first-party data across marketing channels which informs real-time variations in creative content, giving rise to new briefs crafted with the assistance of generative AI.

“That effectively is a flywheel that is running in the cloud that is enabled by artificial intelligence,” said Henry Cowling, Media.Monks’ chief innovation officer.

These creative variations have proven particularly beneficial for Media.Monks’ global automotive brand partner, with the delivery of region-specific content, based on micro-moments such as hour, date, location or real-time events taking place. This all led to increased brand relevance for the client, Cowling says.

Speed up ad optimization

At independent digital agency PMG, marketers can glean real-time data visualizations and campaign reports via a generative AI-powered augmented analytics tool called “Ask Alli” trained on data from vendor platforms, aggregated CDP and ecommerce insights.

Made available to the agency’s brand partners next week, marketers will be able to gain myriad campaign insights by posing queries such as “Can you show me the performance of TikTok vs. Snapchat vs. Meta for the past 7 days?” or “What are my best-performing audiences?”

In doing so, they can track their social budget’s pacing over the last month allowing them to make data-driven decisions, such as evaluating platform performance, identifying top-performing creatives and ensuring their ad spend aligns with monthly objectives.

This negates the need for an analytics or data engineering team to construct dashboards, pull reporting or spend time manually identifying and translating insights from data, said Chris Alvares, PMG’s head of technology.

Discover new audiences

Momentum’s AI tech stack, soon to be made client-facing, utilizes an extensive array of data sources including clients’ first-party data, third-party data and the agency’s proprietary research, which range from previous ads, target keywords, funnel data and demographic insights.

This enables precision segmentation that allows brand partners to target their desired audience.

For instance, consider a consumer-packaged goods (CPG) company launching a new product that diverges from its traditional offerings. While they may have a deep understanding of their existing customer, they lack information about the new category because of a lack of data and insights.

Through Momentum’s AI tech stack, these brands gain the capability to identify their potential new customers, determine effective channels for engagement and even create tailored content.

“This is where the generative AI tools become valuable in the realm of experiential marketing,” said Momentum’s Snyder.

McKinsey’s Pyramid Framework for storytelling

 

28/36 : 🌐 McKinsey’s Pyramid Framework for storytelling

A tool used to process and structure large amounts of information to convey a story, message or presentation without omitting important details.

20 AUG 2023

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What is the Pyramid of Communication?

Minto Pyramid Principle also referred to as McKinsey’s Pyramid Principle is a tool used to process and structure large amounts of information to convey a story, message, or presentation without omitting important details. The principle of the McKinsey Pyramid is to cut to the chase in written texts or presentations. This ensures that the audience’s attention is captured and that a riveting story can be created that’s easy to remember and understand.

The Minto Pyramid Principle is applied by structuring points and arguments after the thesis statement has been introduced. The information that is presented subsequently branches off to the specific details in a clear and insightful manner.

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Pyramid Principle History

The Pyramid Principle is used in the consulting world over – whether during interim internal discussions or executive-level presentations. Executive attention spans are notoriously short – don’t make your point in the first 10 seconds, and you’ve already lost your audience. That’s where the Pyramid Principle comes in. This is a seminal concept in executive communication and has spread like a virus from McKinsey to every other consulting firm worth its salt, including of course Bain and BCG.

The Pyramid Principle was created by Barbara Minto – the first female post-MBA hire at McKinsey – in the 1970s. Her concept literally flipped presentations on their head, and her book on the subject is still widely recognized as the standard for communicating concepts and arguments in a logical, well-structured way.

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Why Is the Pyramid Principle so Effective?

The Pyramid Principle is very important to help you organize discussions with executives. 

Management consultants exist to tackle really tough challenges. If clients’ problems were easy to solve, they would solve them quickly with their own teams. So management consulting teams cram a lot of analysis, research, and synthesis into every project. 

But clients don’t have a ton of time to absorb all the great information and insights that were gathered in order to solve their problems. They have full-time jobs that keep them really busy.  

The Pyramid Principle helps busy executives absorb your message quickly because it uses vertical relationships between the key points:

• Top-level: The summary point you need to communicate. 

• Second level: The key points supporting the top-level point.

• Third level: Data that supports second-level points.

You begin with the answer first, by communicating your summary point. This way, the listener has time to absorb that point and can easily see how your later points support it, strengthening your argument. 

The third-level data supports the second-level points, resolving any questions that might be raised and further strengthening your argument. Each piece of information in your pyramid supports the level above it.

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How Do You Use the Pyramid Principle?

First, we set the stage with the introduction, starting with the governing thought. Then we go into the SCQA sequence, and finally, use horizontal and vertical logic to support our arguments with both deductive and inductive reasoning.

• Situation: The context, the time, and the place. Something everyone can agree on.

• Complication: The problem, relevancy, sense of urgency to listen or act.

• Question: The question that naturally arises following the complication. This is the start of the question-and-answer flow.

• Answer: Your main idea.
  

  

The SCQA Approach

To apply the Pyramid Principle, we use the SCQA framework. SCQA stands for:

• Situation

• Complication

• Question

• Answer

Situation This is the context of the problem you are trying to solve and consists of the simple and indisputable truth of the matter. It’s the first step that involves looking beyond the symptoms since it answers the “why”.

Complication In this part, we assess the reason behind the problem. We call it “the so what’ of the problem. It answers the “how”.

Question This part involves formulating a hypothesis, by asking questions. Here, you pose questions about the situation, eventually coming up with answers.

Answer In this section, we come up with answers to the questions formulated in the previous section. After confirming your hypothesis to be true, you can begin to structure and arrange the information. This way, you can present it before an audience in chronological order.

We see this in action when using horizontal and vertical logic while creating an introductory flow.

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Using Horizontal and Vertical Logic

At the top of the pyramid is the point you’re trying to make—the key takeaway. Underneath that are three arguments to support your idea. Each of those arguments should be built on reasons that support it. The top of your pyramid has to be actionable, and it is supported by the arguments that follow below. Essentially, you’re starting with what you want and then supporting that with three reasons explaining why you want it.

When presenting your arguments, put them in logical groupings. Rank your arguments in order of importance, and keep them in discrete groups—if you’re talking about key metrics and sales automation, make all your points about key metrics before moving on to sales automation.

Presenting your ideas in this order lets you use both vertical and horizontal logic. Vertical logic is the storyline, the question-and-answer dialogue. As you travel down the Pyramid, you’re starting with your main idea, posing questions, and answering them with your supporting arguments.

The horizontal logic of the pyramid uses either inductive or deductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is the method you’re probably most familiar with. It involves making a general statement, and using specific examples to validate that statement: Birds can fly. I can fly, therefore I am a bird.

Inductive reasoning is the opposite, inferring a specific statement from a set of general supporting arguments.

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Building the Pyramid: An Example

The Situation

When we look at the company sales data, we see that there has been a decline over the years. We also face increased competition, even though we introduced new features two years ago and relaunched the product. These new features required a new factory to be built, which also increased costs. We have to increase market share to attain an economy of scale.

Pyramid Principle Applied

To regain profitability we have to improve market share by cutting prices:

• Lower prices will increase sales.

• Lower prices vis-a-vis competitors will increase our market share.

• Increased volume helps us create economies of scale.

Using the Pyramid Principle, you can directly and effectively target your message. It’s not the only method for telling a story, but it’s an effective, direct approach that leaves no room for fluff, allowing you to focus your message on what you want, and why you want it.

How to Apply the Pyramid Principle to Pitching Ideas

It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3! Allow me to explain in three simple steps:

1. Begin with your conclusion

Your conclusion is a summary of your governing thought. It’s the single most important idea in your sales pitch, the primary message.

2. Create a list of your supporting arguments.

The second step is to compile a list of your reasons but doesn’t go overboard by explaining them. These are your supporting facts. A helpful pointer, use the rule of 3. It’s guaranteed to maximize the time with your audience and make you look decisive and confident.

3. Accompany your supporting facts with data

Back up your supporting facts with additional information such as pie charts, statistics, and graphs. This helps reinforce your governing thought and add credibility to your argument.

And voila! You’d be amazed how clearly you communicated your ideas and pitch, and more importantly, at the positive reactions, you get from your audience.

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