Some will have heard of it but few have held it in their hands. Most will never see a copy (I’ve glanced the cover only). The Game Day Playbook is a chapter by chapter, step-by-step, guide to organising and winning a pitch.
At Initiative, there are five copies and they are closely tracked.
The book captures the experience of Geoff Clarke, COO, IPG Mediabrands Australia. Some estimate he’s brought in, or been a part of, pitches worth a cumulated $1 billion over his 32 years in media.
He describes the pitch as the attraction, almost an addiction to the pressure, that is the media business.
“For a short period of time, you're going into war with your fellow work colleagues to solve a puzzle in the shortest possible time, under the most enormous pressure to deliver this amazing experience on game day,” he told AdNews.
“And there is nothing like waking up on game day when you've done hours and hours and hours of work and you think you've got the best possible business solution for the client wrapped up with amazing creativity, and then you've got one hour, two hours to get it right.”
When he started, in the junior ranks, the pitch within the full service agency had creative leading the show, and media being a second thought.
“When we decoupled ourselves from the creative agencies, it was a coming of age for us as a discipline or a craft skill and we very much put the volume as the centerpiece to what we would say to clients … bigger is best,” he said.
“And we commoditised the conversation very early on in those days, by saying that the price of media that you pay for is your number one concern, Mr Client, because you need to ensure that you get the best possible price for the money that you're spending.
“Very quickly we commoditised our very valuable IP. I think if we had our time over again, we possibly wouldn't have done that.”
Today the process can be elongated and frantic.
“Fast forward to today, and if you look at the new business process, there are a couple of things that I could possibly say, Yes, the process now is more elongated.
“The new business experience from client to client is not the same. Sometimes you will be briefed on possibly one, two, even three, brand solutions.
“They might put in a portfolio management solution that you need to create. And so therefore there's four responses. Those could be annual briefs. You've got a commercial response to complete, you've got a media pricing response to complete, and you've also got a written response. And so therefore, you'll be given X number of weeks to create all of that work product. You may have two or three tenders live at the same time, running to very, very similar timelines.”
What makes a good media person?
“I think today you certainly need a thick skin. You need to be relentless in the pursuit of excellence,” he said.
“It's getting harder and harder and harder to produce good quality output. You need more of a business brain than you had to in the past. I think clients need true business solutions versus straight media solutions.
“When I started my career, excellence was defined by how well you did media, meaning how well you bought a campaign, or how well you planned a campaign.
“Today buying and planning media is table stakes. It's really the business solution that you're trying to develop for the client. I think that's probably the biggest difference.
“If you look at the decades in terms of the way that the industry's gone, I think your intelligence in regards to that business solution, you need to be able to translate it really simply to clients.
“The media industry does at times over complicate, with the view that if the solution sounds more complicated then you’re going to sound smarter and … therefore impress the client. Whereas quite often the opposite is the truth.”
Clarke, like many of his peers, fell into advertising by accident.
He left school in 1990, studied law for a couple of years. “I'd always wanted to be in sports marketing and management, a little bit like Jerry Maguire, in the movie which came later.”
He grabbed a phone book and looked up sport and sports marketing in the Yellow Pages.
At that time there was a recession and few jobs. But he finally got to speak to the CEO of IMG, the sports management firm originally known as the International Management Group. The CEO quickly realized he was talking to a young kid.
He said: “You've got a minute.”
Clarke: “I'm trying to break into the industry. What advice would you give me?
He said: “My advice would be to go get a job in media.”
He hung up.
His grandmother, with whom he was living with at the time, had worked at Channel 7.
He got hold of the sports sales manager for Seven, Rod Reid, who said he had no jobs but please come in for a chat. When meeting Reid, Anthony Fitzgerald, the Seven sales director at the time, popped his head in and said he was going over to have a meeting with John Steedman.
Somehow his CV found its way over to JWT. They called asking if he wanted to interview for a media assistant role.
In the interview, he was asked about his favourite TV show? His least favourite? Favourite commercial? Least favourite?
“My answer to the least favourite commercial was Kellogg's corn flakes, the worst ad I've ever seen in my entire life,” he said.
“I launched into this barrage of why it was terrible as a young kid. I didn’t really understand that I was sitting in J Walter Thompson, the oldest ad agency in the world, with the oldest relationship with Kellogg's in the world.”
They phoned and said they had some good news and some bad news. The good news was a job as a media assistant. The bad news was he’d be working on Kellogg's.
“That started what was a seven-year relationship on Kellogg's,” he said.
“I think media was the last industry where you could just walk off the street. And if you were prepared to work hard, prepared to do the long hours, if you had certain qualities about you in regards to attention to detail, and you were service orientated, and you knew what good output looked like, and you were not prepared to settle for anything less than great output. Then you survived.”
His hot tip.
“The simpler you can make the solution, the more simple you can articulate how that solution can be implemented,” he said.
“Through new business, I do speak to a lot of clients, because I've been running the new business program for you know, close to a decade now.
“When I speak to clients, I talk to them about there is a huge responsibility that we have, because we're not only representing you as the marketer, but we're representing your brand in market. And that brand can be 10s of years old, it can be hundreds of years of age. It can have a certain level of equity in the marketplace.
“That is a huge responsibility that you need to take on. That's something that I'm not sure that everyone understands, because you're working on so many clients or so many brands, and you're under so much resource pressure and time pressure that that you can get into the trap of just getting stuff off the production line very, very quickly, because your TO DO list is huge.”
A pitch is something like a puzzle.
“At the end of the day, we're given a business problem to solve, and that business problem is a puzzle.
“You know, constructing the solution to that puzzle you must ensure that we have the right resources and the right skills and the right experience on that client's business to solve that problem and consistently solve that problem and grow with that client's business over the course of not only the contractual term, but over the longevity of the relationship that should go on for a long time.
“There is also the puzzle in terms of the commercial side of that, in terms of how am I going to be able to afford to put that team in place to solve that puzzle, and is that client willing and able and aware of how much that team costs to create the solution to that puzzle, then you've got the actual team members that are equipped with individual greatness in terms of the skill set that they represent, and the modern day marketplace, that skill set now is a lot more finely tuned than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
“Specialisation is a lot greater now than what it has been in the past. And so therefore the operational pressure to ensure that you've got an efficient way of working, that you've got a standardised output that is almost templatised, is now being automated through AI technology.
“There is an amount of enjoyment that comes with the problem that you receive, and particularly from a new business perspective. You are ultimately given a problem to solve, and you are given a finite time to which to solve that problem, and you either arrive at the finish line, which is game day, or you don’t. That is the ultimate challenge.
“There's a huge amount of enjoyment to that, that is almost addictive, because that is what media is. It's about solving puzzles or solving problems and presenting the best possible solutions and doing it with like-minded individuals that you trust.”
Clarke runs a high-performance leadership course, and one of the things that he stresses is that when you walk through the door each day, you should have two things in mind.
“The first thing is to be the most trusted individual you can possibly be every single day, and that's through your own credibility, your own reliability, the intimacy or relationships that you keep, and your self-orientation needs to be away from yourself to others.
“And then the second thought in your mind, it needs to be, how can I help someone today be more successful than they were yesterday?
“If you've got those two core thoughts in your mind at the start of every day, that is how you build high performance, and that is how you win more business, and that is how you ultimately solve problems better than your competitors down the road, because everyone is armed, , arguably, with the same level of technology.
“Yes, there's differences in technologies, but really, it comes down to the IP that you and your business represent. . It comes down to the culture that you have as a business, and the strength of that connection between individuals as to whether or not you'll be successful.”
Back to the Game Day Playbook. It’s 78 pages long and something of a bible.
It’s about being organised, do as much as possible before the pitch, be as prepared as you can. The more organised you are on the day of the pitch, the better.
“I've pretty much written the best practice way to pitch for clients' business using my 30 odd years’ experience. And that is something that we guard very, very closely.
“Having a well drilled process, having very clear roles and responsibilities, having a team that understands each other as individuals, a team that wants each other to succeed, that is really comfortable knowing that there is no real pressure going in on game day, because you've got each other's back.
“The more standardised you are, that creates time. And then the time that you create, through being efficient, you can deliver the creativity and the thinking.
And there are some rules. The first 72 hours is the most important time period of any tender. You have to ensure that you get yourself organised.”
Clarke is a massive Mercedes Benz fan. The S class is the pinnacle and the technology filters down to the other makes and models across their portfolio, but it also permeates out through to the market, to other brands.
“The new business product is the pinnacle of any agency's product, and that will then go and inform the rest of the agency's day-to-day product each and every day. You're basically sticking a flag in the sand, and you're saying to the client, I've got one go to make a lasting impression that will turn into a long term partnership that's going to deliver business results, both for you and for us.”
The human connection is the most important component to the new business process.
“People might think that it is the idea, the creativity, the added value, the media pricing, the commercials, you know, the solution itself. They're all very important. And clients have their own evaluation criteria that you never get visibility to, and they're weighted differently.
“However, the one thing that I've learned over the years that you can't really mark and you can't really articulate is human connection.
“You have to make a very strong human connection straight away, and that is pretty much done in the first minutes that you're in the room.
“The client will quite readily and very quickly size you up in terms of whether or not you're someone that they would want to work with side by side for any length of time.
“Let's face it, you're with your clients probably more than they are with some of their family members, depending on the hours that you have to work.”
And understanding what success looks like for that person on the client side is an ongoing process.
“We all have our own individual KPIs that we are asked to achieve, and we quite often sit down with clients and, through a program that we have, we will find out from them what their individual goals are.”
What does success look like for you as an individual by the end of the year? And that's going to be a combination of, is the brand or the product that that I'm in charge of in a healthy position, and is it delivering the sales or is it delivering the category exposure?
“I would say the new business is probably more focused on the brand, because that's the problem or the puzzle that you've been given to solve in that moment.
“But the human connection that you make in that room is going to inform the client, long term, whether or not he or she wants to work with you, or does he or she believe that you're going to be able to help them individually.”
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