Don't use your client's brand or images in a pitch

Whether it’s as part of a full sales and marketing audit (which is how an engagement with me typically starts), or as an ask on its own (“spend a few hours looking and tell us what we could immediately improve”), I give feedback on agencies’ pitch decks pretty often. I’ve seen nearly 100 agencies’ decks since I started work as a marketing agency non-executive director and business development consultant last year.

I see this mistake used by somewhere between ⅓ and ½ of all marketing agencies: don’t use the client’s images or brand in your pitch.

Most commonly, it’s an image found on Google as the background of the title slide.

If having one of their brand’s images on the title slide is the only way the client can tell this pitch is for them, then the problem is with the rest of the slides, not the title.

I’ve also worked for brands and called a pitch for a new agency partner, where I’ve seen several agencies use the same one of our images as their title.

This doesn’t help them to stand out at all and only serves to highlight the similarities between them. Most of the pitches I saw at Evans Halshaw, for example, were largely the same: they had similar logos on the slide of clients’ logos; and similar awards; they used the same tools to gather insights; they had similar case studies; they followed a similar format. A pitch shouldn’t come down to the one or two things you say that’re different. One of the reasons you want to go last in a pitch process is to take advantage of recency bias…and to come in and blow them away with how different you look to every other agency they’ve just seen.

The client knows what their brand looks like (and it doesn’t bode well for the relationship when you get it slightly wrong, which most of you do). If you feel like your own brand identity isn’t distinctive, get it redone. This is money well spent. One of the reasons Rise at Seven was able to land Missguided as a client after about 6 weeks of trading was that our brand identity was distinctive from other agencies and looked like the kind of agency made just for them: we were fond of saying “if we wanted to work with HSBC, we’d look like HSBC. There’s a reason we look like Missguided”.

I want to see fonts that aren’t the same fonts; colour palettes that aren’t the same colours; images that tell a story. At Pendragon PLC, who owned the Evans Halshaw and Stratstone dealerships, Our Google team used an aerial shot of our car park for the title slide of their update meeting meetings. They literally owned the most popular image search engine in the world and the best image they could find was one of the building that we were sitting in (and that they weren’t sitting in: they joined the meetings remotely). If I was pitching for Evans Halshaw, I’d have taken photos of the teams’ cars to show that they were car people (I might have even used their cars instead of their faces on the intros slide).

This is the exception to “don’t use the client’s images”: you can (and maybe should) use images of yourself experiencing the products (and you can use other clients’ images in case studies, especially if you did the work…I remember seeing a credentials deck from an agency called Apposing, now acquired/merged: their case studies switched their own brand colours out for the blues of Playstation for that case study; or the red and yellow of McDonalds for that one; tying it together in the same format, with the same fonts. You can do that if your clients have the most instantly recognisable colour palettes in the world).

If you’re from a beautiful part of the world, make your location part of your story and uses images you’ve taken of your hometown (“you can come and spend time with us in the Lake District/Peak District/Edinburgh/Dublin etc. instead of your rubbish office we’re in right now” - absolutely what Google should have done, instead of the shot of our Nottingham car park). Use pictures of your people. Use stock imagery (yes, really) as long as it isn’t cliched and helps you make the point (no bullseyes; people on mountaintops; smiling people in a boardroom; or close ups of handshakes).

Next time you have a pitch - and now I’ve told you that about half the competitive field is using a picture from Google Images - think about how you might make your agency look different. Drop me a message if you need help.