Pitch/Reality Fail
Out for drinks with friends last week, the topic of conversation turned to recalling/comparing either the dumbest things we’ve heard of getting pitched to clients, or worse, the dumbest things we’ve had to pitch to clients ourselves.
If you’ve worked in or around advertising for any length of time, you have almost certainly, at one point or another, been witness to an idea that is so mindbendingly stupid, but that also somehow survives to a pitch, it sort of forces you begin to question reality. I’m not entirely sure how or why this happens, but once you get done putting your mind back together, they usually make for great stories. And so we came up with the idea for the “Pitch Fail” blog. A blog meant to house peoples stories of terrible ideas so that they wouldn’t have stay in your head.
It was just exactly the sort of idea that I spend a few hours planning with friends, and that we’ll promise that we’re “really going to do this - not like last time”, and then we don’t do it anyway.
But what I did think it would be good for, the blog idea, was a bit in a longer piece of fiction of I’ve been working on. The problem, which I came to pretty much as soon as I started writing, was that framed as fiction, all the things that made this funny no longer seemed funny. My first assumption was that it was my own feeble skill as a writer and that my attempts to fictionalize the concepts had robbed them of some critical ingredient. But then, even just writing down actual pitches verbatim, not exaggerating them at all, when presented as fiction, they all sounded just way too bizarre to come off as credible.
I was reminded of something I once heard Sarah Vowel say about why she liked writing non-fiction: with non-fiction you could writing far more unbelievable things than you ever could in with fiction.
I can’t speak for other professions, but it’s a weird thing when you realize the work you do is sometimes so disconnected from reality that it won’t even work as a joke.
