Pitching an Idea You Can Actually Build

The call tends to come a few days after the win.

The agency has every reason to be delighted. The idea at the centre of the pitch was bold and the client loved it. Every visitor to the campaign site gets a short film made just for them, with their name, their suburb and their favourite team woven through it, launching the same night as the TV spot. Now someone has to build it, the launch is five weeks away, and the question on the call is whether that’s possible.

Sometimes the answer is yes. More often it’s “yes, but not quite like that”, and the gap between what the client bought in the pitch room and what can be built in five weeks becomes the first difficult conversation of a new relationship. Nobody wants to have it, least of all the agency that just won.

Most of that gap can be closed before the deck is finalised, usually in less time than anyone expects.

Why do unbuildable ideas win pitches?

Because a pitch rewards the idea, and there’s rarely anyone in the room whose job is to ask how it works. Pitch timelines are tight, the creative is still moving on the morning of the presentation, and “we’ll work out the technical side once we’ve won” is an understandable call to make at 10pm with a deck half built.

Generative tools have made this harder to spot. A few years ago, a concept for a personalised film would have been shown as a storyboard, and everyone understood it was a sketch of an intention. Now it can be shown as a convincing sample film, produced in an afternoon. It looks finished, so the client reasonably assumes that what they’ve seen is close to what they’ll get. The sample says nothing about what it takes to make fifty thousand of them in the hour after the ad runs.

What does “buildable” actually mean?

Almost anything is possible, so possibility is the wrong test. Buildable means the idea can be delivered to the standard the client expects, inside the constraints the client will actually impose, by the date it has to launch.

Those constraints are rarely in the brief. The time available is whatever sits between the win and the launch once approvals, content production and testing have taken their share, which is usually much less than the pitch team assumed. The idea has to run on the platforms it will really live on: the client’s existing website platform, the social channels as they currently permit, the phones the audience actually carries. And it has to get past the client’s own gatekeepers, which is where more ideas stall than anywhere else.

Those gatekeepers deserve their own mention. Large clients have legal teams who will want to review anything that collects personal information, IT security teams who assess new hosting and third-party services, and brand teams who approve every asset. Each of those teams works to a timeline of its own, set long before the campaign existed. An idea that captures faces, voices or anything about children will spend real time in legal review under the Australian Privacy Principles before a line of it is built. A security assessment of a new hosting provider can take longer than the build itself.

Which parts of an idea should be tested before the pitch?

You don’t need to test all of it. Most of any campaign idea is well-trodden ground: pages, forms, video, social content. What needs testing is the one or two things the idea depends on, the part where, if it doesn’t work, there’s no idea left.

For the personalised film, that’s the rendering. How long does one film take to produce, and what happens when tens of thousands of people ask for one in the same hour? The answer usually changes the idea without killing it. Rather than rendering a fresh film per person, you pre-produce a library of segments and assemble them on request, with the name and suburb laid over the top. The viewer sees something close to identical, produced in a way that survives the spike after the ad runs.

An augmented reality idea that recognises a product on a supermarket shelf lives or dies on the recognition. Does it work under fluorescent lighting, on the older phones a big share of the audience still uses, with the packaging variations found in real stores rather than the hero pack in the render? Ideas that pull in content from a social platform depend on the platform still allowing it, and several have narrowed what outside developers can access in recent years, sometimes with little notice. A live activation at a venue usually hangs on the venue’s network, and on how it behaves with a few thousand people standing on it.

We’ve written before about the questions that get the right thing built, and one of them does most of the work at pitch stage: what’s the riskiest part, and can we prove it first?

How do you test an idea in pitch time?

Pitch time is short, so the testing has to be proportionate. Three things fit comfortably inside most pitch schedules.

A half-hour conversation before the idea is locked. Walk a technical partner through the concept and ask where it’s likely to be hard. An experienced production team will usually spot the difficult part within minutes, because they’ve seen that shape of idea before. This is the cheapest insurance in the whole process, most useful while the idea is still soft enough to adjust.

A quick prototype of the risky mechanic, when the idea hangs on it. If the whole concept depends on the phone recognising a pack on a shelf, a rough test of that one thing, taking a day or two, tells you whether you’re pitching something real. It won’t be pretty and it doesn’t need to be. It exists to answer one question.

A version ladder in the back pocket. Work out the full idea, the version that still delivers the heart of it if the risky part turns out harder than hoped, and the simple fallback that could launch on the day regardless. You don’t have to show the ladder in the pitch. Having it means that when the client asks “and what if that doesn’t work?”, there’s a considered answer ready, and clients tend to trust an agency that has one.

Alongside those, it helps to write down the assumptions the idea rests on, such as the client’s platform being able to host it, legal approving the data capture, or the content being ready by a particular date. A short list of assumptions, kept with the deck, turns the post-win conversation from “this isn’t what we pitched” into “here’s the assumption that changed, and here’s what we do about it”.

Doesn’t this water the idea down?

It’s a fair worry. Creative teams have watched plenty of good ideas worn away by caution. A technical partner who says no to everything is no use to anybody.

In practice, constraints found at pitch stage usually become part of the creative. The segment library for the personalised film is as much a creative decision as a technical one, made by the creative team while the idea is still theirs to shape. When the same constraint turns up after the win, it arrives as a cut, made by whoever is building under deadline, and the creative team hears about it afterwards.

Occasionally the test shows the idea can’t be done in the time available. That’s disappointing to find out a week before a pitch. Finding out after the win, once the client has fallen for the idea and booked media around it, is considerably worse. If the date genuinely can’t move, the rest of the project runs on the principles we set out in delivering to a fixed deadline, which is far easier when the pitch was honest about the date from the start.

Where does a production partner fit at pitch stage?

From the build side, we’d much rather hear an idea at pitch stage than at kick-off. A short conversation before the deck is locked saves everyone a harder one later, and at that stage there’s still room to shape the idea rather than just deliver it. Working as a production partner to agencies, those are some of the most useful half-hours we spend. The conversation stays between us, and whether the client ever knows there was a technical partner involved is the agency’s call.

What this means for your next pitch

Before the big idea goes into the deck, identify the one thing it can’t live without, and find out whether it will work in the conditions it will actually face, in the time actually available, and with the client’s legal and IT teams satisfied. It rarely takes more than a conversation and occasionally a couple of days. The pitch that results is usually just as bold, with the difference that it can still be delivered by the time the ad goes to air.

Simon Paul is a Business Solutions and Technology Specialist at Code Brewery who’s spent 25+ years turning business ideas into software that actually earns its keep. He has taken the call a few days after the win more times than he’d like, and much prefers the one a week before the pitch. Reach out to Simon to talk through an idea while there’s still time to shape it.