David Nobay

(Video transcript)
I think from any creative agencies point of view just the idea of pitching is really a difficult one to get your head around because the business has become sufficiently complicated in terms of the moving parts that make up marketing these days.
That everything we do in our entire approach at D5 is all about collaboration, it’s not about pulling rabbits out of hats and to a large extent pitches are about pulling rabbits out of hats so it’s a totally false situation because you try to convince yourself and the client that you guys can work really well together but a lot of the time the process doesn’t allow you to work together so one of the things that actually for me was quite refreshing on this pitch we just did with the guys at P3 is, it wasn’t about pulling rabbits out of hats it was actually about a step by step process just getting to know whether we liked each other first of all, whether we could just share the sense of humor, share the point of view on the business and then started to dig into how we would interact and how we would work together and it’s amazing because pretty soon I think we both started feeling some really serious chemistry.
For me that’s always the biggest problem with pitches is you walk out going I have no idea whether they liked us or hated us. You know which is a kind of crazy situation but we actually knew through the protracted kind of stages we actually were never in that situation.
We’d walk away saying, I think that went really well or I think we need to amp up this side of the conversation but we were never unclear about where we were. Especially for a fairly small agency like us that’s important because there is a lot of physical investment for us going into a pitch. It’s not something we do lightly.