How to Pitch Creative Ideas With Insight, Execution, & Influence

Hi everybody, and welcome to the Brandeans podcast series Go Beyond, where we take a look at topics facing marketing today and in the future. I'm your host, Brian McHale. Welcome, we're glad you're here. And today we're going to talk about a topic, actually a couple of topics, uh, that, uh, all revolve around the idea of creative pitches. Uh, we at Brandeans, being an ad agency, Obviously come to a creative pitch with certain things in mind. We're bringing ideas, but we also wanna talk about how clients and brands can help people like us do better with pitches as far as feedback and those sorts of things. So we're glad you're here. And I'm also glad to welcome Tim Hogan. Tim is Brandeis' Vice President and Executive Creative Director. And Tim's background, he's done a couple of pitches around creative in his career. Two or three. Most recently, more recently, I'd say, for brands like Tri-Health and Skyline Chili. But then in your past, brands like Maker's Mark and Chiquita and Bush's Baked Beans. So a lot of great brands. And so you've, you've seen a lot and been through a lot, and really interested to hear your perspective today. And the other thing I wanted to mention is, at Brandeance, we use sort of a strength test called StrengthsFinders. And the idea of that is to, to determine someone's top 5 strengths. And one One of Tim's top 5 strengths is called Woo, W-O-O. Woo. And basically that strength is all about helping to win over others, which is Woo, W-O-O. So that's what today's all about. And Tim, thanks for being here. Thanks, glad to be here. Let's dig in. Yeah. So let's start at a real high level on this topic as far as creative pitches and what works well, what doesn't work well. Times you hear that pitching creative is really hard. And I think it can be. Tell me, why does it have that reputation? Why is it so hard to pitch creative? Well, it's an emotional thing. I mean, you've poured a lot of blood and sweat and tears into this creative product, and you're going in there and it's like a performance. You either get applause or you get the boos. And so you go in with some emotions, and the client's going to bring different emotions. To the table. And so it can be hard. And that's why you have to do the science part first. You know, it isn't just go in there and sing your song. It's make sure you've done your homework, make sure you have your support so that you have a good place to defend your ideas and persuade and convince folks that your ideas are going to achieve the objective. I sometimes think that creative gets a little bit of a bad rap when people start talking about presenting and emotion comes into play and all those things. I absolutely agree with that. But I would suggest, being someone who came up through the media ranks, I got very emotional sometimes and attached to my media plans. I hope so. And as well as social team would probably say the same thing, or our research team. Everybody should be presenting something that they feel very strongly about and deeply about. Uh, you just have to figure out how to not let your emotion, your ego get in the way of, of making a recommendation that is sound, uh, and something that is gonna help build the business in the way that the client needs it to be built. Yep. In my experience, typically if a pitch doesn't go well, it's not because the work is bad. There are other things that are happening in the room or maybe happened as you were thinking about putting that presentation together. Talk a little bit about what you've seen that could be some of those underlying factors that don't really help you in a pitch scenario. Well, I think, you know, being prepared is the most important thing, right? It's the work you do before you get to the pitch, because if you walk into a pitch and just start presenting ideas, it's going to go off the rails because the client doesn't know what to expect. They're just reacting to personal bias and looking at things and going, well, I like that, or I don't like that. So it's really the work you do before you get there is equally as important as the work you're about to share. If staying in the room for a second, just thinking about part of what you just said, In the first couple of minutes of a pitch, are there certain things you're trying to establish early on to— I don't necessarily like the term control the room, but in many respects you are. You're trying to take people on a journey. Without a doubt. Yeah. You want to set the rules for the pitch and the presentation for the folks, not in a way where you're bossing them or, you know, you don't want to come off as really controlling, but just lay the groundwork for what to expect. You know, you start off with— I say it's equal parts science and, you know, creative. And the creative part is what you're going to show, the product you're going to bring in and the storytelling you do, you know, to sell your ideas. But the science part of it is just as important. And that's the work, as I said, the work you did before you got there. You got to have a creative brief. You got to ground the clients in the room with the objective. You know, what are we here to do? And it's not to show you pretty pictures and get, you know, make you like our work. It's to, you know, address the objective, which is whatever that challenge is for that client. And as long as you set it up that way and you can support your ideas, then you've got a defensible position. You aren't just saying, how do you like this idea? Or wouldn't this be fun? You know, it's really got to be the science part of it is having your creative brief, having your objective and bringing in any consumer insights or data support points that you need to support the creative that you're about to present. I think just building on that, I, one of the, one of the things that, that, um, I always look for, because a lot of times I'm helping to present these ideas, but, but I'm not the, the master showman like maybe you are in something like, like a, a pitch. And, um, I always start to get nervous when I see that the conversation is centered around, becoming centered around taste versus kind of the outcome. What do we want this creative idea to do? What do we want this campaign to do? You used the word or the phrases earlier, I like this or I don't like that. When you start to get into that world, especially early on, I've found that it can sometimes be hard to recover as far as getting the idea back or the conversation back to where it should be, and that is, what do we want this to do ultimately? Because you may not be the target, Mr. Client or Mr. Brand. Absolutely right. I mean, I think as a creative, you always have to walk into a room and establish that this creative isn't necessarily for you or for me. We always want to make sure it's grounded in the target audience and what insights we know about those folks, because that's who we're trying to get a response from, right? We're trying to generate some action from them, not necessarily from us. So always trying to be empathetic with the target audience and come in and remind the clients throughout, and also people on your team, that this is what this creative is intended to do and who it's doing it for. It's not just us. It's not our opinions. Our opinions count and their opinions count more, but it's ultimately up to the consumer, and that's what we're trying to generate ideas for. So as we start to maybe take it down just a level and maybe start to get into the work and discussing the work that goes into a pitch, not only before but also during, if we're pitching something, that brand or a client has come to us and said, we have a problem, we have a challenge, we need you to help How do you help us solve that? Now, we've all been in pitches where maybe that challenge wasn't clear or those sorts of things, but typically it's pretty clear and everybody, you think, knows what that challenge or problem is as you walk into that room. But how do you restate that problem to start a conversation, or do you? Yeah, yeah. I think it's important always to bring it back to that, especially if it starts to go down a path that becomes a personal bias or an opinion, or I don't like whatever it is, blue. You know, it's always bring it back to the objective and the challenge and what we're trying to solve for. And then if you have good strong support points for it, you'll get the heads to start nodding and go, you're right, you're right. And you can always kind of bring it back, but that's why you have to establish that at the beginning so you can refer back to it. If it starts to go off the rails, go, remember, This is what we're here for, and this is why we're doing this. And everybody will kind of realign and go, okay, okay. And it gets you back on track. And I think it's also important just with that remember piece to help remind people in the room that they may not be the target audience. And quite often they're not. And their personal biases or opinions may not be anything like that target audience in the way that they think. There's a phrase that we all hear, walking in your target audience's shoes. You have to do that as a creative. Your team has to do that as a creative. I know, shoot, other disciplines within the agency— media, social media— they all have to think like that target as best they can. What does that look like? How do you do that? It's a difficult thing. It's an acquired talent. You have to really set your mind that way because you're always going to go to your own personal bias, and the client's going to do the same thing. The other side of that is we know what we know, right? We've been living with this brand or with this brand promise or with this problem or the objective of the challenge. The consumers, they got a million things to think about and it isn't this. So, you know, to take yourself back and go, all right, we know too much. You know, you can't assume that the client, the customer, the end user is going to have that much thought put towards it. So sometimes you have to cut back to the chase and go, we got to tell them this first. You know, we got to make this point to them first because they aren't sitting there in their everyday life thinking about our product or our service, you know. So we've got to constantly check ourselves and then remind the client to do the same because they know way more than we do about their brand, you know. And so We have to always remind ourselves that the consumer is not thinking about us and we need to simplify and cut to the chase and not try to be too cute and make sure that they understand what we're selling them. You mentioned creative brief earlier and a lot of what you're talking about right there would show up in a brief, priority of communication, what's most important, what's secondary, tertiary, et cetera. We obviously live and die when we can by a creative brief. If you don't have that good roadmap laid out for you, then everybody's kind of guessing. How do you use that creative brief, thinking about the development of the creative all the way through the pitch? Because I'm assuming it's a part of the pitch as well. It is for us. We always make sure we include it because it gives you, again, a defensible position. If people are starting to question What you're doing, you're going, well, we all aligned to this. You know, we all said we would do that. And these are the important points that have to come through. Priority communication, you hit on it. And it's, it's probably the most important thing in the brief because when you look at a creative problem, a lot of times the client will come and say, here are the 12 things we need to get done. Well, guess what? We're not going to do all 12 effectively. So let's put them in an order and a priority. And, you know, if it's a digital ad, you're maybe going to get 2 of them in there, you know, if it's a small space digital ad, you know, but if it's going to be a 30-second radio spot or a TV spot, you might get a lot more of the story in, you know. So having that priority of communication is super key and making sure that people agree, because the last thing you want to do is develop a whole campaign and here's your top 2 points in your priority communication, and then you learn in the pitch Well, that one down there at number 5 is the one that's most important to us, the client. That's the worst time to learn that kind of thing. So getting alignment on the whole brief, but most importantly, that priority communication, because then you can really craft your message to be effective. Well, I mean, we feel like creative briefs are such an important part. We've actually developed, as you know, AI agents internally to be able to create those briefs, hopefully in a— faster and better way than what we were doing before to make sure that they're consistent, make sure that your team gets the information that you need in as succinct a manner as possible. So it's a key. And sometimes I think about it, people might think of it as a crutch because you're doing all this upfront work, but those are people that haven't sat in our shoes, I think, and been on our side of the process. And clients are all different. I mean, some clients like to bring you their own creative brief that they've used internally to get the project approved and moving forward. Love it. Sometimes those things, they need to look at the word brief and see what the definition of that is, because sometimes there'll be 12 pages, right? But we're about more information is better at the start. Yeah. And we'll call that down and get it into a more concise brief and then take that back to them. And say, here's what we think are the most important points, gain that alignment, then you're starting off within a place that you know you're going to deliver on the promise that you gave them. And that's really important because if you don't have that, you're going to come in with ideas that might be creative and might be, wow, this is fun, it's entertaining, it made me laugh, but does it achieve the objective? You know, so those are the things that you want to make sure that every idea you bring into the room whatever range you're showing, they all have to deliver on the promise and solve for the objective. Yeah. And we also love and try to use consumer insights to help you and others on your team just find that true nugget, that great idea that can just bring everything to life. Clients don't always have that consumer insight or consumer research available, particularly if it's a smaller campaign. So, you know, something that we put together, have developed recently, again, going back to AI agents, is we've developed a synthetic research tool that allows us to pressure test creative ideas in the early stages, even before a client has even heard them, so that we can figure out, is this worth going to the next step?, and it's faster and less expensive, and, but it still enables your team, um, to get some nuggets that you can then take to greater places. Super valuable tool. Uh, you know, I, all the way back, research and consumer research, uh, has always been, for whatever reason, the, the piece that got cut early, you know, even 20 years ago, because it, it takes time, it takes investment. You know, it's a lot of money to find out if this stuff is doing what you intended it to do. And so usually we would always recommend it, but it would always be kind of on a budgetary, you know, decision. That's the first thing cut. And it was always interesting to me because I would argue back and go, well, we're going to spend a couple million dollars putting it out there. Wouldn't you want to spend, you know, $20,000, $30,000 to make sure that we're doing you know, that the consumers are reacting the way we want it to. Well, now we have an opportunity with this AI research and the agents we've created to, as you said, pressure test these things. Just find out if the folks, you know, the way humans would interact with this, is it hitting the points that they say, you know, and we put in things like the same type of lifestyle characteristics. It's not just demographics. I mean, there are a lot of contextual things that we put into this to make them representative of the types of folks that are in our target audience. And we can actually get, you know, see their reaction to it. And it's even interesting that you get verbatims, right? Just like you would in a focus group. And I always say I wouldn't share the verbatims because it's not a human, but it gives you a human reaction to the creative and it's super valuable. Like you said, from a directional, you know, you can see which ones are really rising to the top. You can see which ones are actually feeding back what you wanted the consumer to take from that communication, which is super cool. And it gives you confidence that you're on the right track, you know, and it also allows you to then, like you said, go back and steer it in a direction, maybe tweak some things that wouldn't have been tweaked before, you know, to get in there with the strongest possible presentation of your creative. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a great tool. And I think we're only scratching the surface with it at this point. It's just going to continue to get better and better. And if we can get better and better creative out of it faster because of narrowing down that research phase, it's just a 10x kind of addition. And it's almost instant. Yeah. If you get the information and put it in, it's back. You aren't waiting weeks and going, I wonder what it's going to come back like. Yeah. So let's go back to the brief for a second. We talked about priority communication. We talked about a variety of other things that are in a brief. There's also typically a section that might be mandatories. There are certain things that a brand or clients want to make sure that are in there. And one of the things, just kind of combining that idea of mandatories and AI, you'll remember this story that we had a retail client that had a mandatory of, we kind of referred to it as the hero shot. It was the large exterior shot of a retail location. They felt like it was really adding value. For the consumer to see that they were a legitimate player in their space. And we put some of their video through some emotion tracking video analysis, which is a machine learning tool that we have. And coming out of that, we were able to see that the hero shot was adding no value. I mean, you could see that people turned off as soon as that came on. And so we were able to use that tool to go back to the client and say, If we're doing 15-second commercials for you or 30-second commercials, because at the time that's primarily what we were doing for them, uh, if you're wasting really 4 seconds on a hero shot, uh, it might make all of us feel good or we might like the look of it, but it's not doing anything for your consumer. So putting ourselves in your target audience's shoes, we ought to cut that out and find something that they will get value from for 4 seconds. Um, those types of things have to be invaluable. For, you know, a team like yours. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was such a great tool because we didn't really have a strong argument to say that that's not a good idea. It's, it's not a good thing to do. It made sense from a logical standpoint, you know, to show your brick and mortar and show what a great facility you have and that people are coming into the business and it's got your brand ID all over it. Made sense. You know, I mean, we, we didn't love the idea of the shot. At the beginning of the spot, but, but we didn't have a strong enough reason to refute it and talk them out of it. And that emotion tracking and actually tracked folks and they could see the attention span. And when the building came up, it dropped significantly. Now, like you said, only 3, 4 seconds, but it's hard to build that attention span back up after a setback like that. And especially early in a commercial, you know, you want to be able to hook them, keep them, and keep them interested. And you want that line to slowly go up throughout the spot to the end. And you have a setback like that. And when we showed it to them, they went, wow, yeah, you're right. Let's re-edit. Let's take it out of there. And we did. And it wasn't part of the emotion. It was just a check the box for the client and a pride moment, you know, of their facility. But it didn't do anything for the consumer. So out it goes. Yeah. No, it's a great tool and great lesson. And, you know, we're able to make better creative because of it. And you're not always going to get them to agree. They might say, I don't care, I want it in there. But you've made your case, you've made your point. And we had some data and some actual proof that it was hurting the spot. And they saw that and agreed with us and said, let's take it out. I want to go back to something you said earlier. You were talking, you referenced options, you referenced, um, uh, bringing a number of ideas. And I know you well enough to know what you like to do, but, but explain what, how you like to walk into a room as far as options, because I know you don't typically walk in with just one idea. You, you give, you give several. Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, at Brandeis, our our— we always go in with at least 3 ideas, but no more than 4. If you get beyond 4 or 5, it just confuses the room and nobody can land in a place. You know, occasionally, if you have 5 great ideas and you can't weed it down to 3, you bring them in, but make sure you have a strong recommendation. But we're generally— we try to come in with 3 because it's a good range, but it's digestible. The key to that is that You can't walk in with a straw dog. You know, you can't just walk in with an idea that, hey, we know they're not going to buy it, but that will sell off of this. Bad idea. Every time I've seen that happen, the client picked it. Yeah, every time. It happens a lot. It happens more than we'd like to admit. So, so lessons learned. Don't walk in with an idea you don't believe in, you know. And so we always try to go in with a range of 3 strong ideas. And usually we'll start with one that's pretty close into the brand and pretty— not quite expected, but almost. It's like it's a no-brainer. You know, some people call it, you know, knock it 200 yards down the middle of the fairway and, you know, it's going to work. It's maybe not the most creative, but it's, you know, it's going to work. And then we try to step out a little bit and push the creative boundaries just a little bit.. And then on the third one, take it even further and try to go out there with what we call breakthrough creative, something that's so different that it will stop and capture attention. It demands attention. Doesn't mean that that's always our reco. You know, it may be the most creative or the most fun or, you know, the most entertaining, but that's not always the recommendation. We always strive to recommend whichever one we think is going to work the hardest. Again, going back to the brief, we're going to point to the objective and go, if we're all in the room, you know, we may like different pieces of each of these, but this one is the one we think is going to deliver on this objective. So we try to present 3, come through with a strong recommendation. But again, the key takeaway from this is don't walk in with something you don't want to use because chances are you could end up there. Are there any tips or tricks that you have Um, you mentioned, hey, you know, can it— can become overwhelming. I don't know if you use that word, but that was the idea. It could become overwhelming if you, if you present too many ideas. Any tips or tricks that you have to help walk a client through multiple, multiple ideas so that they— it, it doesn't feel overwhelming? I don't know if it's a trick. A lot of clients that we've worked with think they, they figured out our trick, and that is they know that we're going to recommend the third one. You know, we're going to— I know you just wanted to lead me to this place, but sometimes that's not the case. You know, sometimes we'll come back and go, no, we feel this one in the middle is the sweet spot, and that is what we're recommending you do. So, no, there isn't really a trick to leading them to a place, I don't think. But, you know, talking about the difference, the differences in the ideas and what this one does a little better than that one. It's an intentional thing. It is intentional. Yeah. Sometimes they come back at you and say, "Well, I love that about this idea. Can we put it in that one?" And you never commit in a room to say yes because you don't know if that's going to work, but you always have to be open to that feedback and go in and be prepared for it and say, "Yeah, that's an interesting— maybe we need to look back at our priority of communication and say, do these need to be flipped or something like that?" It's great to get good feedback where you know where the client stands and you know what they like about the creative or dislike about it. But you can't try to solve it in the room. It's a mistake to solve it in the room because then you kind of handcuff yourself going back to bring back round 2. Yeah. I guess it's the non-sexy side of thinking about multiple ideas and having fun and ideating and all of that. What role does cost play in all of this? Because it has— I mean, I've seen it where we'll have a great idea and we'll then look at each other and say, I don't think we can afford to do that. Let's figure out maybe if there's a way to do that in a less expensive way, or it simply isn't going to work. So how does cost enter into the whole creative process for you? Very important. Place in the brief. And, you know, clients are always a little skittish to share budgets upfront because they think you're just saying how much you got to spend and we'll spend it all. But really, that's not why we're asking that point. We're asking that point because it does have an impact on how you approach the creative development. You know, you may have this idea of, you know, you're going to fly all these drones over a stadium and you're going to do this amazing light show, but it's not feasible in the budget. So it's, it's, I just say to all clients that might be listening, it's a valid question and it helps make sure that the creative product that you're being presented is the best use of that money. You know, if you know what you've got to spend, you might have to simplify your way of thinking. Doesn't mean it limits your creative or your creativity. It just means you have to limit the way you're thinking. Okay, we're not going to you know, go get a movie star to be our spokesperson or whatever it is, you know, you can think within the realm of, well, this has to be a much simpler idea, you know, and you may not have gone there, but it opens up doors instead of closing doors. Sometimes you find out you've got this limited budget. It, it makes you think about the creative in a totally different way. Yeah. The creative, I think a lot of our references today so far have been about not only the idea, but then visual and those sorts of things. And we do tend to show visuals when in some way, shape, or form when presenting ideas, pitching ideas. But a pitch is a lot more than just the visual. There's also an emotion to it. There's a feel to it. You want to make sure that you're helping the brand understand how that target audience is going to interact or feel as they go through their journey of being introduced to your brand and hopefully becoming a customer of that brand. When you're pitching, are there things that you do to try to help the client or brand understand what that journey's going to be like from a target audience standpoint? Yeah, I mean, you know, I love the pitch. It's what I like to do. I mean, because it's storytelling. I mean, you're basically telling them how this is coming to life, you know, and whether you have grandiose visuals, whether you have an animatic storyboard that looks like the spot and you've already recorded a voiceover, or whether you're just telling it yourself, it's really how you tell the story. And it is an emotional reaction. You want them to feel what the consumer is going to feel when they see or hear your ad or your campaign. And so it's, it's really about how you tell the story, all the, the visuals that come with it. You know, I mean, I've presented things with pencil sketches, I've presented things that looked like finished art, you know. And so you can tell the story either way. It's— those are all just pieces that help them visualize or get the feeling, because you're right, all those decisions, any decisions we make are emotion-driven, you know. So you want them to feel the emotion in the room. If it's a very sterile, you know, if it's a PowerPoint and you're just clicking slides, it's going to feel like that, you know. So it really is about bringing life into the room and helping them get— it helps them get excited about the ideas. And that's what you want. You want the consumer to be excited. You want them to feel that excitement. And we've talked about walking in the brand's consumer shoes or target audience's shoes. We have to understand our target audience when we walk in that pitch because everybody receives information differently and we don't pitch an idea the same way to two clients. And so it's important for us to understand our target audience and strategize about how we want to present this idea before we walk in the room. That's a great point because Again, we were talking about the target audience not being us, not being the client, but the client is our target audience. So you're absolutely right in thinking that we need to know them as best we can and how they receive information, just like you would the consumer. How do they want to get it? How do they— what do they react to? The more you know the client, the stronger your relationship, the better you get at that. If it's a brand new pitch, you don't know them very well. You try to do your homework, you try to understand what makes them tick, but you don't know them that well. So you have to kind of, you know, be adaptive in your pitch and in the room and read the room and listen to the comments and kind of react. Once you have a relationship with a client, you know how to talk to them about the ideas and you can go in there sometimes with no visual and just tell your story and they go, great, let's go, let's do that. You know, so it's important to know the audience and the audience in that case for us is the client. Yeah, no question. And like I said, it is interesting when you think about just— you pick any two clients and think about how differently we pitch. And I think a lot of people don't always think about their target and what they're trying to achieve in that room. They just think about their idea and why it's a great idea. And it may very well be, but if nobody's in the buying mood, you're not going to get much of a reception. And I think also too, I think one of the things that I've seen you and others at our place do well is we keep bringing it back to the outcome. Stay outcome-focused. Don't get hung up on the color of this or the shot here. I mean, you want to talk about those things and why they're relevant and how they're strengthening the story, but you need to keep linking all of those things back to an outcome. Otherwise, it just becomes features and features do not make a great creative idea. Right. And those features can change. You know, those aren't the important parts. It's the emotion, the feeling, and the, you know, what we're trying to get them to do, you know, and the colors can change, the people can change, you know, a dog comes in or a cat comes out, you know, it doesn't matter. Those little details might not be key to the concept. So try to keep the focus on that objective and what we're trying to the action that we're trying to get the consumer to take. And as long as you're supporting that, you know, like I said earlier, you start to get the nods in the room and then you've already got them on your side. You know, it's just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. That's if you give them the support all along the way, then you're a lot further to selling your idea, right? I know this rarely happens to us, but sometimes we don't get the nods. Sometimes people— sure, sometimes people object. What are some of the objections you're listening for first as you're pitching? What are the ones that always make you the most nervous if you start hearing them early? Yeah. Well, I think it's mostly the personal bias type questions that aren't material to what the concept or the campaign is trying to do. And you have to tread lightly on it because they obviously have a strong feeling about it. You know, to bring it up. But again, and it's the support. If you can bring it back to, I hear you. I mean, I don't like blue, you know, it's— but, but this is why it's blue, because that communicates this type of emotion. And we're trying to put people in this place. The consumer is going to react to that color differently than you are, you know. And so just trying to, to take the personal bias out of it and, and keep it as objective as possible and keep it as focused as you can. On the objective. That's why doing the homework and having the brief and having all of the science part of it there to support. It's not just my opinion against yours. Right. And you, you know, as you said, you're reinforcing that, you know, hey, I hear you. Active listening is such a big part of any pitch, in my opinion, because you can get into that mode where you're up there, you're excited about your idea, you really want to share it. You're taking people through, you're doing all the right things, but if you're not reading the room, if you're not actively listening, you can miss what could eventually harpoon the whole idea just because you're so caught up in your own world. Right. Yeah. Active listening, very important, and being open to good feedback because a lot of times they'll, you know, a client will come through with a piece of insight that you didn't have. You know, it didn't show up in the brief. It didn't show up in your research. It didn't show up in any insights. And you learn that and you have to be open to it, you know, and take it as a valuable thing. You know, when you start defending your ideas beyond a rational argument, it becomes personal for you, you know, and you have to be able to let that go. Ego shouldn't be part of a creative presentation, you know. Yeah, we love our ideas. We treat them like our babies, but you can't be so attached that you get argumentative. It's a surefire way to kill your idea, right? Is to try to push it too far and just be smart and listen. And when a client comes back with valuable objective feedback, not only take it, credit them for it. You know, it's like, wow, that's a great insight and thank you for that. And when they feel like they've got some ownership in the idea, man, then they'll end up selling it for you, you know? So, so be open to that and take those moments and credit them and appreciate it. You know, again, if it's— if it doesn't make sense and there's a strong rationale against it, you make your case. But, you know, listen, listen attentively and, you know, take that good feedback and make the idea better. That's what we all want. I mean, that's what the client wants. That's what we want as creatives. You know, you want a campaign or a concept or an ad that's gonna work, and so be open to it. What we do in preparation for pitches and what we rely on when we're in the room and pitching, but also there's the whole piece of client feedback that we get in the room, and we try to help steer that a little bit at times because we want to have them stay focused on the outcome, maybe not necessarily on emotional feedback. What does good client feedback look like in a pitch? How can they give feedback that can help us do better and be better for them? Well, I think it's try not to make it just my personal choice. You know, if they give good objective feedback or feedback that is based in an insight or something, you have to be open to it. You have to understand it and welcome it. Those are good feedback is objective. It's, "Oh, you said the objective of this communication is this. I challenge you in this area because it's not making me feel that." Okay, that's a valid objection and let's talk about it. And we may not come up with the answer right there on the spot, but being open to that kind of feedback all day long. It's just when it becomes something like, "I don't like that." Well, why don't you like it? I don't know. I don't like dogs. And you've got a dog in it. That's not good feedback. But I think one of the things that we try to do when we're presenting is anticipate the questions that are going to be asked and be prepared for them. There's nothing worse in a presentation than have a client ask and everybody look at each other and go, who's taking this? I don't know what the answer is. So really, being the devil's advocate in the room and have everybody on your team try to pick apart what they think the challenges might be or the questions might be and have answers. Be prepared for them so that they'll feel confident that, oh, they've thought about this. Right. I think the devil's advocate role in doing that pre-pitch is so important. We do, I think, a fairly good job of that. We try to make sure that people can play that role. A lot of times I'm the one who's asked to sit in and say, hey, play devil's advocate. Here's our idea. Help me think through whether there's something that, that maybe I'm not seeing because I'm too close to it. Those sorts of things that can really help, I think, cement an idea and make a presentation be what it really should be versus maybe a little less tight. Yeah, it actually elevates the presentation when you're able to catch those things before the client asks the question, and maybe you make it better. You fix things, you you bring the whole concept up and then you feel that much more confident. And that comes through when you're presenting it, you know, if you're confident in it. Yeah, it's good. Well, thanks. I— our last section, as you know, we do these Mythbusters. Okay, now I've got 4 myths right here. All right, and, um, you're gonna bust them. You're gonna tell me. Okay, I'll read them off. Let's talk about it. So one myth that I feel like I hear a lot, Tim, is The best idea always wins. Myth. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you feel about it, but other than you just said myth, but it's— I've seen the best ideas go down in flames because people didn't adequately prepare to get that idea across, just like you were talking. Yeah. And sometimes there's a good reason that the best didn't win. But, but sometimes it's, it's, it's operator error, you know. If you don't come in with your support points and your data points and your insights and support the reasons why you landed there and why it's such a great idea, then you either didn't do a good job of communicating it or you just didn't do the homework. And, and so, you know, you, you can't always blame the client if they choose the wrong idea. It's— you didn't make the case, you know. You didn't convince them or persuade them that this was the right place to be. And again, back to the beginning, that's why you go in with, you know, ideas that you can stand behind because you won't always land on the one that you want. Right. Second myth: good creative sells itself. I think we've, we've blown that one out already. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, sometimes it does, you know, but it's— but you can't count on that. I mean, you know, you can stick a piece of creative as a flashcard and have people go, great, let's do it. But that's not the way to get it done. You know, I mean, I think the case we've made is, is you have to have the support. You know, it doesn't just sell itself. Now, to the consumer, it should— they shouldn't have to be explained through all the detail. It should sell itself when it gets to the consumer. If you've done the work right and you've done a good job. But to the client, you want to kind of walk them through why each step was— why each piece is important in this concept, right? Third myth: showing more options makes brands feel better. Makes them feel worse a lot of times because it makes you feel scattered and you just don't know where— you know, if, if we have this many ideas, how do— how are they supposed to choose? You know, I mean, like I said, sometimes we have so many good ideas that we'll go in with 5, maybe even 6, and we'll explain, you know, and we'll say, we're gonna talk through these 'cause we gotta weed some of them out, you know, but they were good enough that we wanted to at least explain them to you and share them with you. But yeah, too many ideas is just, it makes it hard. And you get into a lot of that Frankensteining that we were talking about before. Oh, I like this piece of that one and this one and that one and this one. Put all 4 of those together. And that's probably not going to work the way it sounds when you say it. Right, right. Exactly. Last myth: if your idea gets killed, you did something wrong. Well, sometimes maybe. Yeah, that's right. But that's not always the case for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are reasons. And being a good listener is important in that and understanding why it didn't. And because if it was something, that you didn't do in the pitch, you can correct that in the future. But more often than not, it's— there's a good reason why you— what you thought was the big idea didn't win. You know, it's— and sometimes they're good reasons, you know, and you just have to live with that and, and like it and, and, and take whatever you can back and make that idea that did win better. You know, what can we do to get what we liked about that into this idea. Right. Well, Tim, that wraps up this episode of Go Beyond. Thank you very much for being here. Really appreciate it. And thank you all for watching. If you liked what you heard, we hope you'll give us a follow, and we're always open to comments. So please add some comments in the notes section. And also in the notes section, you'll see a place that you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter. So please be sure to do that. So, uh, on behalf of Tim and everybody at Brandeis, thanks again for watching Go Beyond, and we'll see you the next time.