Eight Ad agencies bid for
an actual $20 million ad account
in this real life
David & Goliath
competition series.
(Summary below; complete pitch available upon request)
The Idea: It’s one of the most exciting yet uncertain times in the history of advertising, spending for which now exceeds $300 billion annually and a CMO’s average tenure is only 22 months. In the highly volatile Post-Internet world, two empowered twenty-year-olds with a laptop can beat out top Madison Avenue ad agencies – provided they have a great idea and a finger on the pulse of the market.
“The Winning Pitch” is a real life competition show where eight advertising agencies must sell their ideas or perish. The eight agencies are all competing to land one mega corporate ad account that we will establish in the first episode. The Winning Pitch is “MadMen” meets “Project Runway” in a white hot contest that takes you inside all the drama, energy and creative frenzy of the high-priced, high-tension world of advertising as a handful of the business’s top contenders make the pitch for a $20 million dollar account.
How it works
Eight advertising teams, one client (e.g., Kodak) and only one team will win the Kodak contract. We’ll follow these eight creative agencies/teams as they craft their pitches for the final Kodak presentation.
The ad agencies we will follow will range from NYC powerhouses that can readily spend over a quarter of a million dollars on a single pitch, to the likes of a pair of female design school grads working out of an apartment in San Francisco, or a small rebel agency in Austin. Therefore, the battle among this group of eight companies will have a potent underdog versus corporate behemoth component.
An intelligent Reality Show
The Winning Pitch is different from every other reality show. It’s controversial, provocative, and makes no bones about addressing the important social and political issues that every American is compelled by, discusses at the water cooler, at Starbucks, from boardroom to bedroom. With humor, incisiveness and intelligence, the series will invite its competing teams to take on what is controversial, debatable, and essential:
In a climate where upwards of $1.0 billion will be spent on political advertising in insignificant political year of 2009, can a politician or a talk show host be forgiven/resurrected/given a second chance for morally reprehensible behavior? Can advertising actually have a moral conscience?
Is the world as we know and perceive it static or can a smart and savvy marketing genius transform, enrich, intensely inform our experience of it?
Good ideas are so frequently undermined by bad presentations that it’s almost tragic. Therefore, we will bring on our own captivating “Tim Gunn,” ad business icon Greg Stuart, former CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau (the Worldwide Trade Group for Online Media serving AOL, Google, MSN, Yahoo!, New York Times and others) and co-author of “What Sticks”, using his direct in-your-face style to work the room/build up/cut down panache and swagger to dynamically interact with each of the teams, offering input; guiding the creative process; pushing, prodding, propelling participants and teams alike to strive for perfection. The incomparable Greg Stuart, in fact, will be the connective thread that shepherds viewers between our eight teams as they race against time with tightly controlled resources to create their own unique solutions to the high-stakes challenge at hand.
Simple is good and this idea is a simple round robin elimination tournament. What makes this great television is that we have all the elements that make for great stories—big (real) stakes, human drama, David vs. Goliath matchups, pressure of a deadline, a win or go home element and a show primed for branded entertainment ad selling.
For more on the people behind The Winning Pitch. send an email to greg at gregstuart dot com or call +1 631 702 0682.