Business as usual in brand and design.
Every year I’ve worked in agency land, the talk has always been about how we have to do things in a new and different way, that the landscape is changing, and that the way we’ve been doing it is stupid.
It’s self-evident that things are changing and will need different approaches, that’s just a normally functioning market, but we need to stop treating every change like a new epoch or the set up at the start of a pitch deck. You don’t hear the architecture industry doing this!
Here are my most conservative opinions in an industry full of radicals.
Pitching is fine.
Look, ok, a lot of it is poorly conceived and horribly executed – you can look at the archives of this very blog to find tales of some ludicrous and immoral client practices in pitching.
However, on principle I don’t mind a pitch, and actually I relish the competition.
If you’re selling something like design that is at least partly normative in its value, you should be expecting to sometimes have to show rather than tell.
Let’s be honest, just showing case studies the way agencies sometimes do it in pitches is a bit like showing your holiday photos.
Industry lingo is cringeworthy, but basically fine.
Unleash a salad of buzzwords in a pitch and I wouldn’t expect to do well, but there’s no need for the sort of self-flagellation that agency folks go in for.
Every profession I can think of has its own set of specialist language, and it’s extremely normal to have to do some explaining.
There is a limit to what a brand should realistically cost.
Right, so obviously there is no theoretical limit to what the run-out and engagement program for a brand could be, but if we’re talking about strategy and identity creation, then there’s a ceiling on what even the biggest brand in the world should spend. No, I am not going to say what I think that it is.