It's forever been a grey area (at least during my rather short experience with advertising); what role does servicing play when it comes to working on a new business pitch? Does the role end with mere orchestration (fixing time with the client, ensuring that the planners and creatives talk, ensuring that everyone's working to a deadline and applying pressure in the system to assure delivery) or does it end with being a support function (collating data, feeding information, shooting and recording AVs) or is there a way where the value add moves beyond these two?
I've worked on two pitches where the scope of servicing in a pitch has moved beyond the two roles mentioned above and i have to say it was their inputs that made the overall experience of working on the pitch a lot more satisfying. The primary reason for this was the fact that servicing was not (and the involved persons did not act as) a support function but an integral unit of the entire process. In a way, they lead the pitch.
Their inputs were based on two fairly simple facts:
1. They knew the brief from the client a lot, lot better than anybody else involved
2. They knew exactly what the client wanted - again much beyond anybody else involved in the pitch from the agency side did.
And these two facts allowed them to achieve the following:
1. Help channelise the content presented in manner that it answered the brief and also ensured we said everything the client wanted to hear
2. Ensure that we touch upon and deliver aginst every key point mentioned in the brief
3. Keep the client's interests at the heart of our efforts
4. Lead the pitch - not just in terms of orchestration the deliverables but in terms of orchestrating the entire process - from brief to presentation to creative.
5. Have a point of view to share in the meeting which is in sync with the overall thought that the agency aims to project
Servicing thus can make a difference by adding focus and a degree of corrrectness to the presentation and the creative. However, this particular role is not a matter of spending a couple of hours with the concerned teams; it's a matter of spending a day and in some cases days at end sitting in on the process of creation itself.
In the pace at which work's done, there is an argument that the time required for this kind of activity is hard to find. But the counter argument to that is that "time" is a small price to pay for ensuring that the output the agency presents is accurate. It's an even smaller price that one pays when you consider that it allows us to truly live upto the one promise that we repeatedly make to our clients: integration not just in processes but in thought as well
Pitch orchestrators --> Pitch drivers....that's the choice to make!!
Disclaimer: Mine's an opinion restricted to my immediate surroundings....so please forgive me if this comes across as shor-sighted.....it's in the spirit of the key idea behind my blog, "Random Ramblings"!!
Comments
Again in the spirit of random ramblings, I'd like to randomely quote "I am an avid people watcher and this is my psycho anyalsis of the servicing folks.
So a servicing fella is some one who:
Point 1: Always takes interest of abuser(read creative) before anything else, often to detriment to self and everyone else around them
Point 2(read a bigger font size):Unable to make decisions on own without consulting abuser first
Never questions or confronts abuser, sometimes believing their abuser is omnipotent
Point 3 (big point size again):Often becomes aggressive or abusive to others who attempts to offer assistance to the abuser.
Disclaimer:
All in the spirit of no-hard- feelings and random ramblings. Lemme read the post again for that pitch thing, Dhiren :-)