This article may be a spoiler for The Pitch, but The Pitch
is a spoiler for agencies and the Idea.
Here’s the episode if you haven’t seen it: http://www.amctv.com/shows/the-pitch
The conceit is a bit fake: a major assignment for a big
client that doesn’t include a digital component and only five days with no
paying work to do for current clients.
OK. It’s reality TV not reality.
But what happens here is a pretty good analogy for the
problems the agency world is facing.
As clients see less and less value in long-term
relationships, they look to buy individual ideas from a wide roster of agencies
and freelancers. The concept of a “tournament of ideas” plays well to their
bosses. “Look at how many brains we have working our problem.”
The problem isn’t with the idea generation. The problem is
that in this competition both on TV and in the real boardroom, Ideas don’t win.
Clients pick the safe, the trite, the hackneyed or the derivative—never the new.
The Idea is uncomfortable. Clients buy the Idea from a
trusted partner who lives and dies with them. The Idea is a risk. And this way
of choosing creative doesn’t reward risk.
So Subway ends up with an idea that McKinney literally took
from YouTube. They had half a million dollars worth of “creative” talent in the
room and the best they could come up with was, “I saw this guy on YouTube.”
In the follow up interview, the client as much as said that
zAMbies was the most intrusive Idea, but he said he chose McKinney because he “could
see lots of possibilities for Freestyle Breakfast.”
Yes. He gravitated to a place where he felt comfortable. The
client said he wanted "not the Same ol’ Subway." But what he eventually bought
was stuff he felt comfortable with.
Look, I don’t think zAMbies is the Just Do It of QSR
breakfasts, but white guy rapping ingredients to a breakfast sandwich is the
equivalent of that Subway CMO kickin’ it at a Skrillex show. It’s uncomfortable,
wrong and rings false to the 18-24 year olds who it is supposed to appeal to.
The Pitch shows how clients, with the best intentions, make
the poor decisions; how the Idea is being overshadowed by millions of YouTube
views or some other metric that MBAs use to show their own worth; and how broken
the agency business is.
When I saw the people at McKinney back at their office
celebrating and hugging and patting each other on the back, I was repulsed.
Their one idea, talking food, was an awful execution of a solid line, “Let’s
fix breakfast.” The winning concept was such borrowed interest that it wasn't a surprise that the Creative Director would say to camera, “We’ll just have to wait
until Wednesday to see what he (the rapper) comes up with.”
So the value of an agency is that it scours YouTube for talent?
Then it turns the complete creative control over to a guy whose only
credentials were that he rapped about pancakes? Then they get awarded the
business?
From a business perspective, I can understand why everyone
involved played along with The Pitch. Subway got a one-hour product placement.
Both agencies got paid and got incredible coverage.
Going in, I thought it would be difficult to rebound from a
broadcasted loss for the agencies. But now that I see the way WDCG and McKinney
work, I would say it would be even harder to bounce back from the win.
WDGC lost The Pitch, but delivered an Idea. McKinney won The
Pitch, but, I believe, they showed themselves to be creatively vacuous.
And the
real loser was Subway which ended up with a terrible execution of a bad concept.
Let’s hope future CMO’s use the venue of this TV show to try
something risky, to move away from the seen and to force agencies to come up
with brilliance—not just recycled crap.
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