Real life often seems to interfere with posting on a real regular schedule. I’ve been very busy lately, but the weekend is here, so this is a chance to catch up.

England beat France in rugby of course, and tomorrow they play South Africa for the cup. I’m really looking forward to it and the match could be one for the books if England pulls it out. South Africa is favoured of course, but England has always been the underdog in this world cup, and that seems to encourage them.

Tonight Mi Mujer and I watched Argentina thoroughly beat France for the third place finish. It was an exciting game and Argentina just dominated. I’m happy they won because they aren’t one of the standard rugby countries and it shakes things up a bit. Mi Mujer wanted them to win because they’re her cousins and she’ll always cheer for the teams that speak Spanish.

I have been kept busy this past week preparing a pitch to get a new client. I enjoyed working on it because it’s a different kind of service than we normally advertise so it allowed for some different creativity. It was challenging in that they are essentially middle men and they had two distinct and different target audiences. Of course they only want one campaign to reach all of them.

We pitched on Thursday and I started to get a bad feeling when we started in on market research and their response was incredulous. Essentially half of what we based our concepts on wasn’t what they were looking for and ran in a different direction than what they think the customer believes and wants. I’m pretty sure my art director was thinking the same thing I was: Oh, bollocks.

One of the concepts we pitched was particularly bold and aggressive. We believed they needed to differentiate themselves from their competitors because they all do the same thing. All of them say “We are fast, reliable and offer a good service.” Yeah. Since this client was first in mind in the UK and well respected but fairly unknown in Europe and the States, we created a position for them to really own the field. They could stand out from all the other companies that just blurred into an identical mass. This was on brief for what our creative department was given. Their response was “We don’t want to seem too cocky.” Oh, bollocks.

The pitch went as well as it could go. We got the news today that they went with a different agency. While they loved our work and were impressed with the creativity, they felt the other guys ‘had better chemistry’. We’re really nice, they just don’t see us in that way and we should just stay friends. Really I think it was that we were working to a different brief than what the client wanted. I’m not sure where the breakdown occurred but somewhere from the client to our creative department, there was some miscommunication. Oh well, on to the next one.

*PLEASE NOTE* Keywords are no longer allowed in the name field.
This entry was posted on Friday, October 19th, 2007 at 11:45 pm and is filed under Life in GMT, advertising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.