The pitch ends. Your head doesn't.
A pitch becomes your whole life while technically remaining a job you're doing for a few weeks. It's a lot of emotional weight for a PDF.
A pitch becomes your whole life while technically remaining a job you’re doing for a few weeks.
You start with a brief. Fairly quickly you’re carrying an entire possible world around with you. People who don’t exist yet. Films you can already hear. A line that might hold the whole campaign together, if you could just stop touching it. You’re making dinner, walking somewhere, trying to sleep, and some part of your brain is still in the deck.
Then the opportunity gets enormous. There’s a version where this is the one.
It’s a lot of emotional weight for a PDF.
Then you hand it over. Everyone quite reasonably moves to the next stage. Your head takes longer.
I’ve just come out of a retirement pitch and remembered how consuming it is. For weeks I’d been making decisions inside that world all day. Suddenly it didn’t need anything from me. Tired enough to want it gone. Invested enough to miss it.
Relief and flatness turn up together, and neither tells you whether the work was any good.
A bit of distance has helped me see it again. The ideas I still like have a small human action at the centre. Someone making room for someone else. Someone already organising the good part of a change. A detail that tells you a personality before anyone explains it.
Of course, now I’ve stopped staring at it, more possibilities have turned up.
The idea had to fit people who are specific about their plans, and people who don’t want to think about retirement yet. I think we could have taken that a lot further and made it a truth about people. It’s always better to have a plan. If you’ve got other plans, that’s fine too.
There’s a stronger “I don’t give a fuck” in there I’d have liked to chase. The kind you might arrive at after decades of accommodating everyone else. Knowing what you like. Feeling no obligation to explain it. Something with the comic range of the Tina Fey Booking.com work, several sides of one person, pushed far enough to be funny. And a song I’d have wanted to test, to find out whether it was carrying the idea or covering for it.
Are these better? They’re directions I’d want to explore. They haven’t had to survive the brief, the timing, the budget or the room. The work we handed over did.
More time might have taken us somewhere braver. When the possibilities are countless you always need more time.
But maybe the truth is you need the time and the client. A pitch can never be the same as workshopping an idea together with the people who run the business.
My process has changed. With AI in the mix I can take a thought a long way visually on my own. Scamps, storyboards, treatments, three territories where there used to be time for one. Which is useful. A thought can also look finished now long before it’s good.
So you’ve got to use it for the right things, and keep the craft for where it counts. What is the idea. Where’s the humour. Which detail makes it human. What needs cutting.
The thing I wasn’t expecting was how much I’d missed it. Properly bitten again.
I haven’t heard back. Sometimes you never do, and the ideas live on in the next retirement pitch.
I’m still tired.