Minor Faux Pas Can Kill Courtship With Client
It isn’t often that the ad business from one of Hawaii’s biggest banks washes up on the Los Angeles coast. But a few months ago, several top advertising executives from the Bank of Hawaii came to Southern California in search of an agency to handle its $6-million account.
Tom Burr figured that the bank’s officials would get a charge out of being greeted by an ad agency staff decked in Hawaiian garb. So Burr, chairman of the Los Angeles ad firm Abert, Newhoff & Burr, had all his top executives wear Hawaiian shirts.
Unfortunately, the bank’s top advertising executive had seen this act before. And when she walked into the agency’s lobby and spotted the rented coconut palm tree, she knew all too well what was to follow. “Oh, my gosh,” she said to her cohort. “I hope they’re not going to be wearing Hawaiian shirts.”
The agency receptionist who overheard that official’s remark was unable to warn the rest of the staff on time. “We knew we had blown it right then,” said Burr, whose agency handles advertising for Yamaha’s electronic products division and for Beverly Hills Savings. “It took all the pop out of the presentation. And needless to say, we didn’t get the business.”
In fact, ad agency presentations for new business--known as pitches--backfire far more often than many executives care to admit.
And, considering the many hours of planning and the costs of producing even a modest ad campaign, that can mean tens of thousands of dollars down the drain. Advertising executives estimate that pitches for new business can cost anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 when directed at a prospective client with an ad budget of less than $1 million. Some agencies will spend upward of $1 million for pitches aimed at $100-million-plus advertisers.
These pitches are considered valuable for both advertisers looking for a new ad agency and for the ad firms themselves. At one of these sessions, an ad shop usually presents a few ideas for an advertising campaign, highlights other work it has done and recites the creative and other services it has available.
“The amount of time you spend worrying about it--before and after it happens--is amazing. It’s enough to give you a coronary,” said Gene F. Cameron, president of the Los Angeles office of the ad firm BBDO Worldwide. “But after it’s over, you realize it didn’t really make a difference.”
There are plenty of ways to botch these pitches, executives say. Chief among them is just putting on a dull show, they say. Burr, for example, remembers his agency’s first pitch 15 years ago to Irvine Co., the Orange County developer, which literally put a senior executive to sleep.
Sometimes, however, the tiniest things can kill a presentation. Cochrane Chase, chairman emeritus of the Irvine ad firm AC&R;/CCL, remembers how his agency blew a pitch eight years ago when a thirsty Pepsi executive was offered a can of rival Shasta soda.
“Packaged goods people are very, very sensitive about this sort of thing,” said Chase, who knew right then that his agency wouldn’t get the Pepsi business. “You think you’ve covered every detail, but you never really can.”
Sometimes mistakes can be momentous. How about, for example, sending a bus owned by a competing company to pick up one of Greyhound’s top executives? Well, BBDO’s Cameron says that’s what happened several years ago when he was a senior executive at Chiat/Day.
The ad agency was bidding for the business of a Greyhound division, and it wanted to send an ultra-plush bus to the airport to pick up the visiting Greyhound executive. When the Venice firm was unable to rent a Greyhound bus, Cameron said, it rented another brand and covered up the name. “The guy noticed right away,” said Cameron, “and he almost refused to get on the bus.”
There are even occasions when spats between agencies and potential clients can erupt during presentations. Just ask Nancy G. Shalek, president of the Shalek Agency in Los Angeles, which she recently purchased from the ad firm W. B. Doner. About a year ago, Shalek gave a presentation to executives at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
When the department’s executives finished asking Shalek questions, she told them she had several questions. She wanted to know more about the department to help her further plan a campaign. Shalek remembers them telling her: “We’re here to find out about you. You’re not here to find out about us.” Shalek replied, “Oh, yes we are.” That ended the presentation--and Shalek didn’t get the business.
Sometimes, however, an agency and its prospective client literally don’t speak the same language. A few years ago, for example, the Santa Ana ad agency Salvati Montgomery Sakoda made a unsuccessful pitch for the Makita Tools ad business, a Japanese tool maker with a sales office in Cerritos.
After the presentation, the Makita executives gathered around Kenneth Sakoda, the agency’s creative director, who is of Japanese decent, and started speaking to him in Japanese. “What they found out very quickly is that Ken doesn’t speak Japanese,” said Scott Montgomery, executive vice president at the agency. “He’s since taken a Berlitz language class, but that didn’t work, either. So, we’ve considered having Ken’s mother sit in on some of these pitches, because she speaks Japanese.”
Puck Is Beefing Up Advertising of Pizza
Wolfgang Puck sells desserts at his restaurants for $4.50 a pop--and more. But when it came to his line of frozen desserts--formerly sold at grocery stores in $2.50 single servings--sales were so poor last year that the company stopped making the desserts.
“They were too pricey,” said Bob Koblin, president of the Los Angeles based Wolfgang Puck Food Co. The dessert line, however, was replaced with a line of frozen pizzas modeled after those sold at his popular Spago restaurant--Wolfgang Puck’s Original California Pizza. And strong sales of this pizza line have persuaded the company to pump more money into advertising.
Last week, the company dropped the ad agency Fotouhi Alonso Inc., and took its $1-million-plus account to the Los Angeles office of the J. Walter Thompson. In the works is a big push playing off its so-called California pizza against Chicago-style and New York-style pizzas. “As you might expect,” said Koblin, “the California pizza is lighter, made from natural ingredients and has no preservatives.”
There’s No Question He Thinks It’ll Work
Question: Why did David J. Breznau think anyone would buy his self-published paperback, “The Book of Questions”?
Answer: He doesn’t really know. But he made $200,000 from its sales last year.
The book--which reads more like a philosophy exam --is filled with heavy questions written mostly to promote discussion at parties. And now Breznau is about to publish a magazine that is certain to promote discussion among executives in the Los Angeles ad industry--Body Copy.
The question once again: Why?
“This will be a forum for the Los Angeles ad industry,” said Breznau, a 34-year-old Westwood resident. “It will give local ad people a chance to really talk to each other.”
The first issue, scheduled to premiere in March, will be 80 pages, published every other month and distributed free to 20,000 ad executives. The name, Body Copy, refers to industry jargon for the written “copy” used in the “body” of a printed ad below a headline. The cover story to the first issue is an interview with Bob Kuperman, executive vice president and creative director at Chiat/Day.
Breznau, who spent more than seven years as an art director of the Los Angeles office of DDB Needham, hopes to compete with the ad industry’s two largest trade publications, Adweek and Advertising Age. Unlike the trades, however, Breznau says that articles in Body Copy will initially focus on industry issues of special interest to Los Angeles area. Eventually, however, he said he hopes to take the magazine national.
Of course, Breznau knows he’ll still have an uphill battle making it in the rough-and-tumble Los Angeles ad market. Hoping perhaps to give his publication a slight competitive edge, Breznau has listed in the masthead a 12th member of his publication’s board of advisers: God.
