Populating Your Pyramid? 

Bring some magic to your next pitch with some advertising industry method.

It’s one thing to have a great structure for a pitch but, ultimately, every structure is only as good as its content. At Pitch Camp, we love the Outcomes Pyramid, but it’s still just a bunch of boxes that need to be filled with your best insights and evidence. And sometimes that’s easier said than done. Especially when you are pitching a hard-to-sell concept.

One solution is to borrow a go-to practice from the advertising industry and write yourself a Creative Brief.

An advertising agency Creative Brief is where every successful campaign starts. It delivers the insights creative teams seize on to imaginatively – and persuasively – tell a story.

It brings an ad agency’s strategic thinking together: the understanding of target audiences, the assessment of challenges and opportunities and the insights that lead to compelling key messages. And it contains all the key ingredients for helping you prepare and deliver a compelling, persuasive pitch.

Our Creative Brief asks six simple questions.

Answer them when planning your pitch and you’ll sharpen your clarity and insight and build effectiveness.

I’ve listed them below, along with some tips for effectively completing your brief. There’s also a link to an editable version for you to download.

Your Creative Brief

Who are we talking to?

Describe your audience. What do they do? Why do they do it? How do they do it? How long have they have been doing it? Where do they do it? Who are their influencers? What pleases them? What annoys them? What frustrates them? What transformation are they seeking and why?

Prioritise what’s important and express it in no more than two short paragraphs.

Where are we in their minds?

What do they think of you and what you are proposing? What has been their experience of you in the past? Do they trust you? What risks do you bring? Where does what you are proposing sit within their current needs and consciousness? Do they have a preferred alternative and why?

Again, no more than two short paragraphs.

What is the problem we are trying to solve?

What pain points are you addressing? What challenges are you overcoming? What opportunities are you creating? How will their situation be improved by what you are offering? How do you propose to overcome it?

Ideally one sentence. No more than two.

 What is the promise?

What is the compelling benefit for your audience?

Express this in a way that captures the potential and promise of your offering.  And keep it to one line.

(This should take you more time to get right than the rest of the brief combined. If you get it quickly you might not have tried hard enough.)

What is the support?

Dot-point the reasons why they can believe your promise. But only these reasons; not everything that’s great about you and your offering. They don’t need to know everything, just what’s in it for them.

What is the personality?

What tone are you bringing to this pitch? Excited, reassuring, urgent, trustworthy, friendly, collaborative, authoritative?

One sentence. Maximum, two.