The Art of the Pitch
Nice item by Michael Beirut at Design Observer.
One of my first bosses taught me an important lesson.Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.
"But if the work is good, don't the clients know it when they see it?" I asked.
My boss just looked at me silently for a long time. And then, with gentleness and no small amount of pity, he reached out and patted me on the head: Poor kid.
He was right, of course. In any creative activity where clients are involved, you have to make the sale twice. Before you get to the customer, you have to sell the client. And that's what I love most about the AMC series Mad Men, which starts its second season later this month. It gets so many things right about its subject, the advertising business, but it absolutely nails one thing: the art behind the art of the pitch.
Other than that it is a great piece, why do I mention it? Because that too is how we deal with books, for only rarely do we get to present them to the reader—just as the ad men have to sell the client on what will work with the consumer, our job, most of the time, is to sell the retailer. (Of course, in publishing, we also have the author pitching the agent, and the agent pitching us...there's a lotta hustle in this...)