S1 E5 Mark Perkins & New Business

Stephen Baker:
Hello and welcome to the Digital PR Podcast. A podcast that will cover the big talking points of the digital PR industry. My name is Steve Baker and this is Louise Parker. Hello. We both work at digital marketing agency Propellernet and we’ve both been working in digital PR for a long time. Nearly a decade for you, Lou, right? Yep, that’s right. and over a decade for me now. In the last few years, we’ve seen the digital PR industry explode and with that has come a lot of interesting conversations about how the discipline works and where it’s going. From creativity to relevance to burnout, this podcast will cover the subjects that everyone is talking about with the help of some very special guests.

Louise Parker:
Joining us today is Mark Perkins, Creative Director at Cow, a PR agency based in London. He’s had an illustrious career so far, working on a number of award-winning campaigns that if you work in PR, you will no doubt have heard of. One of them is Missing Type for NHS blood and transplants, and another is Christmas Tinner for game, just to name a few. Of course, behind all those amazing campaigns would have been a new business pitch. And that’s what me and Steve will be talking to him about today. We’ll be picking Mark’s brains about the good, the bad, the ugly of new business pitching and what the future of it might look like. Welcome to the podcast, Mark.

Mark Perkins:
Thank you for having me on.

Louise Parker:
No worries at all. Thank you for making time for us.

Stephen Baker:
Mark, we’re so excited to chat to you about this. Very excited to meet you. We both follow you on Twitter. Enjoy your updates about all things PR and your life. But let’s start, before we get onto like new business, let’s start sort of, I was going to say from the beginning, but not quite from the beginning. Just tell us a little bit about yourself. What’s your background? Where have you worked? What are you doing? What are you doing now? Just tell us a little bit about yourself.

Mark Perkins:
Next month will be 25 years since I’ve been in London agency life, which kind of dates me. I started an agency called the Red Consultancy and was there for a few years and was then Cal’s first employee back in 2000. You were the first? I was the first, yeah. Back in the days when the office consisted of a phone and a file of facts, and I think we might have had one email address between the three of us. I was I think one of the first if not the first creative directors at a PR agency that was back in 2008. I left in 2012 to become creative lead first at an agency called MHP and then W. Then I came back in 2020 just because Having been around the block, I really like Cal. A lot of the people that were here when I left were still here. I like the culture, the agency, its approach to work. And they actually still liked me, funnily enough. And they welcomed me back. What I like about the agency is that it does provocative, interesting, original work. And it kind of matches my ambitions and the way of doing things. Partly because I kind of grew up the Cal way. So at the moment I work with another creative director called Matt on creative ideas with the rest of the agency, also strategy as well. And yeah, very heavily involved in new business and growing the business and attracting new clients.

Louise Parker:
Well, that is why we have you on. That is the subject of today. I mean, the first question we have for you, actually, is that mix of new business and obviously your creative director role. And we were wondering how much do you think a PR new biz pitch is one based on the creative ideas?

Mark Perkins:
It’s a good question, and it depends on the client. Think about this. There’s other factors why you win a pitch. It’s the experience of the clients that you have, chemistry in the room, who you know. But if you just think you’ve got the best ideas and you’re going to win a pitch, you’re wrong because you’re not pitching to creative people. That’s because if they were really genuinely creative, they wouldn’t be a CMO or a brand manager. They hire agencies to do that job. I might think I know what’s a really game-changing, award-winning idea, but they may not necessarily be able to recognize it, or it may not be apparent to them. Similarly, they’ll have agencies pitching to them, and they may not know if an idea has been done 10 times before, if it’s a bit passé or cliche, or if it’s not feasible. I did pitch once for an FMCG brand. We lost the pitch because apparently the other agency came up with the most amazing idea. And that idea I found out was that they were going to get, the whole thing was about how do we communicate with our product, there is no mess. And they came up with the pitch winning idea that they could Lionel Messi, to change his name to Lionel No-Messi, for the World Cup. Now, this was on a 50k budget and Lionel Messi’s brand is his name and he’s not going to change it for a fajita kit for £50,000. But the client thought that was an amazing idea at the time. So just because you’ve got an amazing strategy and a really good set of robust original ideas, you can’t just rest on your laurels because you know you think they’re great. You have to, and I always drill this into people, that when you’re presenting an idea, you have to sell. Don’t tell. Don’t just assume they’ll get it’s a great idea. You really have to give them a vision. of how this idea can blow up and the difference it can make and how it will be received and how people will be talking about it. So don’t just tell them the kind of the beginning and middle and end and make it linear and here’s the idea and get it in the daily mirror and you get this amount of links and that kind of thing. It’s got to be more about what’s the big outcome and you’ve got to remember as well when you’re pitching, you’re not just pitching some ideas and some creative and a program that you’re pitching to someone they’re thinking about okay what’s this going to do for my business how will this drive sales uh what will this do for my personal reputation you know will it you know get me a promotion you know will it get me a different job elsewhere so there’s lots of dynamics going on rather than just here’s a great idea and assuming they’ll lap it up there’s there’s so many ways that you can land it correctly or incorrectly that’s really interesting because

Stephen Baker:
I often, when I first started pitching myself, I often thought it was always about the idea and the strength of ideas and used to stress quite a lot about it. And the follow-up question for that was, what kind of process do you follow when you get a brief in how long do you spend on the ideas versus sort of thinking about their brand or the chemistry or who’s going to be going to that pitch because you’ve raised quite a lot of interesting points there because obviously your role is creative but like how do you split it how do you actually like address that brief and make sure you’re sort of hitting everything that you want to hit?

Mark Perkins:
We’ll never go straight into ideas it’s always it’s the biggest temptation as a creative to do just go straight to ideas but Really understand the brand, the market they’re in, the competitors, but most importantly, the audience. Who is it we’re ultimately speaking to? Who is it we want to buy these products or this service or whose perceptions we want to change? What’s going on in their lives? Have a good understanding of the audience, the media they consume, what life is like for them. And you kind of think like a strategist or a planner. We don’t have those here, so we kind of think we do that role. differently about audiences, brands, marketplace, who we’re pitching to in the room, what the opportunities are, what the risks are, to form a strategy and come up with a platform that is based on a human insight or a brand insight. People get confused about insights. A lot of people think an insight is a fact. It isn’t. A fact is a fact. An insight is more of a hidden human or brand truth. Once you’re equipped with that, You can form a platform or an idea around it. And if you hit the strategy right with that insight, kind of the brand proposition that you’re going in with, sometimes you’ve already won the pitch because you’ve come in with an insight and something about them, their audience, competition that they didn’t know before. But they think, fuck yeah, that’s true. And they go, and here’s how we bring it to life. And then the ideas. Strategy is how you win the war. Tactics are how you win your battles. So you’ve always got to focus on winning the war. Because not just the little things that are going to win you pockets of battles here and there. The strategy is the big picture. And if you can get them to find the big picture, sometimes it’s not about having the right creative ideas. because those can change. Get the strategy right and the insight right and often you’re halfway there, if not fully there.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, because I can imagine like, you could go into a pitch and you have this fantastic idea, which they’re like, yeah, that’s absolutely genius, but wouldn’t work for our brand or like, that doesn’t make any sense for our audience and things like that. And you’re like, well, that was, that’s pointless. You know, that’s not getting you anywhere. But like you said, if you’ve got the insight thing, you can like build from there, even if it isn’t those exact ideas that you’ve gone through in the pitch, they know that you’ve got that kind of initial very important kind of stepping stone that’s going to get to those amazing ideas when you hopefully win the business. Makes a lot of sense.

Mark Perkins:
Yeah, and without pre-empting your questions, I think the important thing as well to have a tissue session so you can stress test those ideas and a good tissue session is one where 50% of your thinking is thrown out because it’s rubbish or it’s not feasible or it’s inappropriate. Which is the point, you can’t win a tissue session. But you can come away with an understanding of what’s right, what isn’t, and areas to build on. And the best tissue sessions are if you go in with something that actually does really excite them. Some stuff, no, that’s not right for us, no, could never do that. But that’s interesting. And a client starts talking. unprompted, thinking out loud, and sometimes, without even knowing it themselves, they’re guiding you towards the answer they’re looking for. And you come away from the tissue session, okay, that’s what we need to focus on, build that out, that’s what’s exciting them. Let’s show it how it can work in different ways across a year or something like that. So, if you don’t have a tissue session, you’re often going into a pitch completely blind because sometimes, you know this, they say they want to be brave and actually they’re on a bravery scale of 1 and they want to move it to 2 or 3 and you’ve gone in with a bravery scale of 10 and you’ve frightened the bejesus out of them. But if you had that session in advance, you kind of know where to pitch it. And sometimes they actually want to be far braver than you thought, you’ve played safe. So you’re just guessing and anticipating and that’s not the way to win a pitch and do best work with them.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, often I think we haven’t had the benefit of having the time to do a tissue session in the past. And actually, I’m sure we’ll come on to that in terms of like the time that’s necessary to be able to do, you know, to prep your new business pitch, but also the kind of lead time, the thinking time and all that kind of stuff. Do you think that that is a bit of a maybe an issue of the potential client wanting to turn around things quite quickly and not giving that ability to have those lead-up meetings before you go into the big, big pizazz pitch at the end?

Mark Perkins:
Well, time is the most valuable commodity when you’re working on your business and if a client really wants to meet their objectives, do the best possible work, drive as many sales as possible, get as much brand fame, then they need to work collaboratively with the agencies in the pitch process because otherwise they’re all just coming in with something that’s half-baked or not quite there. And if you’re the client, you want to, say you’ve got three or four agencies you’re working with, see what they’re thinking, go, yeah, actually that’s really interesting, develop that. Another agency, no, but maybe, so it’s collaborative, but it results in better work. One of the worst pitches we did was for a global, can’t name it, but very famous global electronics company and they refused to do tissue sessions with anyone on what was a, I wouldn’t say it was a complex brief, it was a badly written brief done by committee, but they wanted to focus on CSR and connecting with Gen Z and we want to be relevant to the issues that matter to Gen Z. and they refused to do a tissue session because they thought it would give competitive edge to those agencies that participated. Well yeah it would but every agency should have the opportunity and surely the point is for us all to have the chance to give the best work for you to get to where you want to be. As a result we did the pitch And we had so many questions about the brief, and it was very vague and often contradicting itself. So we had to kind of guesswork what we thought they needed to do. So we presented a case of, well, this is what really matters to Gen Z around sustainability and CSR, what brands should be doing, and what isn’t authentic. So here are ideas based on that. And they said, these ideas are great, but we’d never do them because, you know, they’re too far ahead of where we want to be. Now, if we’d had a tissue session, they could have told us that. And we wouldn’t have wasted four weeks working in the dark trying to guess what they wanted. And actually what they really wanted was something quite glib and superficial with rappers and influencers that actually didn’t really make a difference. And sure enough, the first campaign they did was with Vanilla Ice and he got pulled within 24 hours because he was the wrong talent. It was labeled as the worst case of brand greenwashing by one media title. And for a campaign that was about sustainability, they launched it a day before Vanilla Rice posted pictures from his private jet. So they hadn’t even chosen the right talent. There’s an amount of due diligence that goes in, but they just saw famous name, a kind of a catchy, punny title, and not a good piece of work.

Stephen Baker:
That’s an amazing example. How did you feel when you saw that and the end result of it? Was it one of frustration that there was a missed opportunity for that brand? Or was it a bit of satisfaction with, hey, we told you so? Because there is a bit of that that goes on in PR. It’s like, if you don’t let us have the time and give us the right detail, you’re not going to get any good work.

Mark Perkins:
There is yeah, there was a little bit of schadenfreude about it, but at the time I was bloody livid because it at the end of the pitch they said That was really useful because you helped us understand our brief better than we could. Well, that’s not our job to interpret their brief and replay it back to them and that here’s what we actually need to be doing and here’s how you do it and then realizing that actually they weren’t ready to go there yet and they wanted to be really safe and beige. So that was really annoying, being told that we’d made sense of a brief for them. because we were trying to make sense of it ourselves. And we could tell internally, there were so many different layers and stakeholders feeding into it, they didn’t actually make sense.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, like what, it always fascinates me when you get a bad brief. And it’s like, well, who’s who’s thought of this, there must have been like sign off and, and stuff like that. And in fact, it leads on to our our kind of next question, I suppose, about kind of favourite or least favourite elements of new business pitching. You’re like vastly experienced in this area, but obviously coming up with ideas, creative ideas and presenting them as one part of it. But you’ve touched on the kind of the strategic thinking and the amount of time that goes into it, receiving a brief, tissue sessions, etc. But yeah, could you tell us a little bit about your favourite and least favourite elements of the process from start to finish?

Mark Perkins:
When a brief comes in, and this is just something I’ve always had, there’s this sense of dread. You know, as soon as a brief comes in, we’ve got a brief from so-and-so, and it could be a big multinational, it could be a tiny little ambitious startup, there’s this sense of dread. You’re starting off with a blank page, no thoughts, no ideas, and you think, oh, how the fuck am I going to crack this? And it’s like a monkey on my back. and so I guess there’s a sense of irritation but that’s what drives me and probably others that okay we’ve got to nail it not just come out with what we think would be okay or what might be looking for but we’ll look at what competitors are doing what I always say, you know, as someone doing creative training, to understand what, to do great work, you have to know what great looks like. So often I’ll see what others have been doing in the sector, look at, you know, can Lions win us, and look at case studies from around the world, others that have had this challenge with a brand or an issue and how they’ve addressed it, brought it to life, but also know what bad looks like as well. So don’t do stuff that feels, It’s been done before and it was a bit mediocre. So you sit back and you talk a lot, once again, we talk a lot amongst ourselves about how can we really make a difference here? What would it take to do something different in the sector, something different from this brand? What’s going to excite them? What excites us? So there isn’t a process in the sense that we have loads of time allocated to brainstorming. We just sit and talk and churn and pick out interesting things. Finding stuff from articles we’ve read, that’s interesting. They should be involved in that. And how can we tell that differently and show it in a different way? And those conversations I have with Matt and other people in the team, often they’re very funny. We pitch for an adult entertainment brand. which we run called EricaLust.com which is essentially porn made by women for women. I can’t even really say on this podcast but some of the ideas we came up with were absolutely hilarious. Not necessarily intended to make the brief but it kind of loosened us up a bit for just got us relaxed and I think you know if you’re really tense trying to and if you’re trying to force ideas you’ve got someone standing in the room saying come on let’s have ideas you know it doesn’t work like that you’ve just got to be relaxed, joke, talk about things, anecdotes, personal observations, things that happen to you, something your neighbour told you about that could relate to this and and it starts to bring things to life until you get something that brings you towards that that kind of insight and towards a strategy about what could they be doing, what should they be doing, and how is this gonna make a difference to an audience, and where they go, fuck yeah, that’s clever. So I think a lot of it just comes through chatting, and then you kind of think, okay, we’ve got enough here to work with. And then it’s often in when you start writing things up that other ideas, angles, possibilities become apparent to explore.

Stephen Baker:
I love the fact that that drives you. I share the same thing, that fear when, and actually we talked about it before, where you get a brief and it is like a blank page and you’re like, oh God, there’s so much to do, so much to think about. It requires a lot of energy, a lot of time, a lot of people, a lot of different types of thinking. But yeah, it’s the fact that you obviously spend a lot of time talking about it rather than just these like, is this fair, like rather than predefined kind of processes where it’s like, right, we’ve got one hour where we’re going to scrutinize the brief, then we’ve got two hours to chat about it and then we need to come up with ideas. So it feels like it’s a more, a more natural way you do it. It’s conversational and things come out when you’re talking about it, thinking about it, having a bit of fun with it. Is that fair?

Mark Perkins:
Yeah, and it’s more fluid. If you try and force it, you say it’s segmented into sessions at a time, I know that works for some people, but it’s never worked for me. Personally, I like to go off and have a go online, read stuff myself, and come back and share stuff that I think is interesting and why I think it’s interesting and how it’s prompted me to think differently. And that starts conversations and other people do that as well. So, it’s just about getting the conversation going because if you just say, right, in one hour’s time we’re going to be talking about this potential client and then you just come into a room unequipped without any kind of insights or observations or even anecdotes. You’ve got to just get the ball rolling.

Louise Parker:
You mentioned how you’ve recently just won a new business pitch, which sounds like it’s for an ethical porn company. That’s very interesting. I’m going to imagine that was a fun pitch. I don’t know. But can you tell us about some of your best and worst new business pitches?

Stephen Baker:
I can’t wait for this, by the way, Mark. I’m genuinely

Louise Parker:
Feel free to anonymise where necessary and legally necessary.

Mark Perkins:
I have a list.

Louise Parker:
Yes.

Mark Perkins:
There’s a lot on the list for the worst. In no particular order, I mean, sometimes when you’re doing a pitch and you want to relax the mood, as we do here, Sian, who’s the founder, Sian and I will often talk about a pitch we did to an organisation or a charity body called the Queen Elizabeth Fund, which was for, it was, grants that were given to artisan crafts people by the Queen Mother and after she died the fund continued and they were looking to increase awareness of it and we went and did this pitch and it was just not in Buckingham Palace but just off Buckingham Palace and We just got a sense that we were completely inappropriate before the pitch had even started. We’d seen the other agency coming out and they were all extremely posh and wearing twin sets and pearls and every single one of them was called Felicity, even the men. I just thought, we’re not right for this. We walked in and we had our, this is, we didn’t have a PowerPoint, we had stuff on boards and we carried it in. And we were introduced, and it was lady so-and-so, colonel so-and-so, baroness so-and-so, and they were all over 70, and all kind of well-connected members of the aristocracy. And they were immediately annoyed that we had our boards with us, because they were unsightly. Could you remove them out of sight, please? We could use them for presentation. When you need to present with them, you can present them. But at the moment, they’re unsightly. So that was a bad start. rattled through it, and I can remember the exact moment it happened. Sian made a comment about, and maybe we could even do a feature partnership with the sun, and suddenly this baroness erupted and said, good God! And spluttered, and someone else said, and we realized that they didn’t want to be in the sun. So that was an awful one. There was, There was one we did, this is when I was at MHP, where we were given two days, and this was against my better judgement, kind of the boss told me we had to do it, because of the size of the organisation, two days to put together a presentation, a social strategy and content ideas for this business. And we had to do it in two days because the founder’s wife was going to be there. So we worked around the clock on it and we went to the pitch and met the head of social who seemed quite nervy and then the founder’s wife came in with a face like thunder looking like a zombie Dolly Parton. She’s extremely cantankerous, very irritated to be there, and scowled at us and said, so I hear you’re here to give me social media ideas. I just want you to know two things. I don’t believe in social media and I don’t need your ideas, but go ahead. And she had a dog with her, a little Yorkshire Terrier, who she just let walk around the room. In this vast room, and this dog is just walking around, kind of sniffing her ankles, as we pitched in silence with this woman continuously scowling at us for an hour. I think the dog was more engaged than she was. She was just genuinely angry. And at the end, we finished talking. And there’d been no comment, no interaction. So to kind of break the silence, one of my colleagues who was the head of social said, Did you see anything there that you liked? And she went, nope. Oh, wow. And so we just picked up our stuff and left in silence. That’s so bleak. Patted the dog on the head.

Louise Parker:
Yeah. At least you got to see a dog. That’s quite nice.

Mark Perkins:
Early on in my career. Early on in my career, one of the first pitches I ever did was to Excel Logistics, who were based in Milton Keynes. Now, this is the late 90s, when even a big agency, which at the time was Agency of the Year, Red Consultancy, had Microsoft as a client. We only had one laptop. And you had the company laptop, and it was this brick the size of Canada. And only the MD or the CEO could use it because it was such a valuable, expensive resource. And the pitch was on the laptop. And we got a train to Milton Keynes to do this, which was very big money at the time. So there’s now one and a half million pound pitch to XL Logistics. We all got off the train, looked at each other on the platform, and the boss said, who’s got the laptop? And we’d left it on the train. And again, this is in the days before we had backup. The entire presentation was saved on the laptop. And we just watched the train departing, pulling away. And we had to call up and say that someone had been taken seriously ill at Milton Keynes Station because we had nothing. We had nothing to work off. You know, it’s not like they could just email it up to us because the files were too big in those days. So yeah, that was truly horrific.

Louise Parker:
Did you do the pitch in the end when the person was feeling better?

Mark Perkins:
Yeah, they made a miraculous recovery a few days later. And in fairness, did win it.

Louise Parker:
Oh, God, the absolute sinking feeling, just seeing all that work.

Mark Perkins:
I was just glad I was like the junior account exec. Not really my problem. It wasn’t me that fucked up. There was a kind of understanding no one at the agency hears about this. So I can tell this story now, 25 years on.

Stephen Baker:
Luke, I think you were going to go through, we kind of wanted to paint some scenes for you, didn’t we? And kind of go through your likes and dislikes or views on a number of new business related things.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, we had fun putting together a few common, I guess, things that people comment on in the new business picture. I’m not going to say whether people think they’re positive or negative, because that would ruin the fun to get your impression of them and what you think of them. But yeah, I wanted to paint a little scene of the fact that you’ve just got an RFP through and you’re reading through the information that they’ve given you. I’d like to get your thoughts on each point of these. So you start off and you realise, okay, the big pitch meeting, it’s over Zoom. What is your thoughts on that?

Mark Perkins:
I guess it’s the world we live in. If they are the other side of the country, it’s fine. I mean, if they’re the other side of Shoreditch, that’s a bit crazy. It’s very hard not to win a pitch over Zoom, but to get the best possible pitch out of doing Zoom, because there’s so much going on in the room that’s chemistry and face-to-face. The worst kind of pitches actually are the ones where they turn their screen off. So you’re just pitching to a black screen. That’s awful. Because you do need that, you know, if you’ve got something to say, you want to see their reaction. You work on developing something and landing maybe a killer point, and you’re looking for that reaction and knowing whether you’re onto something. And if you don’t have that, if you’re just, as has happened before, they’ve just turned all the screens off, you’re talking to yourself. I mean, I did have one where I called my dog a fucking idiot, because I forgot I was on Zoom. And I forgot he was under… Actually pitching to the Saudi royal family at my previous agency, and a Saudi princess was on the call. And my dog was asleep under my desk, and I forgot he was there. And the postman came, and he just went berserk. And I said, shut up, you fucking idiot! And then realized that my swearing could be heard by the Saudi royal family. Oh boy. Even though it was on Zoom, I could feel the steam coming out of my boss’s ears.

Louise Parker:
Oh man. Before COVID, did you do, well actually that sounds like maybe that was before COVID, that exact example, but did you used to do Zoom? That was during COVID. Oh, that was during, yeah. Because before then, would you even entertain the idea of doing it via Zoom?

Mark Perkins:
No, God no. And as you’ve seen, how long it took me to set up this call on this meeting. That’s a good thing. And you know, I’m not great with technology. And human interaction is really important. We’re in the art of communication and being able to do it face to face and build relationships and chemistry and understanding. It helps to be together in the same room.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, for sure. So, you are on this Zoom pitch and your potential client, they’re in the car during the whole meeting so you can hear the indicators, you can hear the traffic whizzing past. What are your thoughts on that? Would you say anything?

Mark Perkins:
There might be a reason. Maybe they have to pick up their kids from the nursery, which I could relate to. Now, that’s a weird one. I would find that really disconcerting. Again, they’re distracted, but certainly not anything I’ve encountered. But yeah, I would find it very distracting trying to present to anyone. You want them to be focused on you, not doing something else.

Louise Parker:
I mean, the reason these are on the list is because there have been instances, which we have heard, which this has actually happened. A couple of people have mentioned that this has been the case. I guess, like you said, sometimes it might be unavoidable. Some things happen, which they suddenly mean they need to be in a car. But from the description of when people said these things had happened, it sounded like it was very much planned that they were going to take this call while driving.

Mark Perkins:
I have been in a pitch where the decision maker, his phone went, as we’re doing the introductions, and he said, excuse me for a minute, took his phone, walked out and never came back, which was very strange. And we talk about being ghosted after pitches, we were ghosted in the pitch.

Stephen Baker:
Now that’s a rare one. That’s a curate egg of an e-business experience, that.

Mark Perkins:
Yeah, just off. Yeah, that was actually Sonar Speakers, I’ll name them, because that was two weeks of work down the drain.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, that’s very upsetting. So, on the RFP that you’ve received, they haven’t said a budget. And when questioned, they’ve said, you know, we don’t want to tie you down by naming a budget, you just come back with what you think we should spend. What are your thoughts on that?

Mark Perkins:
Don’t pitch. Just don’t pitch. It’s a bad sign. I’m good mates with people at Taylor Herring and James and Pete there have the same role. Just don’t pitch. If they can’t give you a budget, there’s probably the fact they don’t have a budget or they don’t really know what they want to do. Also a good chance they’re fishing for ideas. And a budget isn’t just for an agency to see how much money they can get out of a client. It’s so they can do really good work. And a client will know how much budget they have. And it seems baffling they’re not able to tell you why. I mean, if there’s a few variables, tell us the variables. And hence why you can have a bronze, silver, gold, platinum option. That’s fine, but if you’re given everything to work with. You’re also given nothing to work with.

Louise Parker:
Yeah. The bronze, silver, gold option, is that the best way to kind of not just say, oh, just use up all the money that you do have if they haven’t given you a budget. It’s just saying, like you said, here are the variables and you can go with what you feel most comfortable with and things like that. But do you think that is much more conducive then to have those three options or four options if you’re going to do platinum, platinum plus?

Mark Perkins:
Yeah, it is. You’ve got to sometimes think maybe there’s an internal thing going on, because they have a marketing budget. So how much are they going to spend on advertising? How much are they going to spend on social, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, on live events? And so they might have so much for PR. And so you’re actually making a case for a bigger slice of the cake. So that makes perfect sense. And sometimes you can show how an idea can be scaled. So you can pitch a single idea. works at a kind of a bronze level, but how if you want to invest more in it, how it can be built up over time over different channels using different elements such as talent, for example, to help give it a boost maybe paid. So a bronze idea can also be a platinum idea, but just has more possibilities and greater reach. Yeah.

Louise Parker:
We spoke about time before, so you’ve got the RFP and they said to you the big pitch, not even the tissue meeting, the big pitch is next week. Is that a goer? You did say that you just did one in two days, so maybe that is possible.

Mark Perkins:
Well, that was a disaster. It didn’t go quite so well. The dog liked us. You always want to say no. It’s very hard to do your best work in two days. But we’ve actually just won a piece of business here for a very well-known brand, where they came to us. I guess it was more a sense of urgency. They wanted something to happen in January. And they got some budget left over from this year. We hadn’t worked with them before, so that was a big incentive. So we delivered a pitch-winning idea. Actually, in that case, it was non-competitive. But if they take their business seriously, and if they take people they work with seriously, they give you time. It’s a bad sign that they put what is often undue or unnecessary pressure. And sometimes it’s for reasons like, oh, well, I’m going on holiday. I’ll be back for two weeks. Well, that’s their problem. It’s not your problem. let us respond when you get back from holiday, you’ll get a better response. Unless there’s any reason, any urgency, that they need it that quickly. And if they need it that quickly, why did they not think of it before? So that tells me of an individual or an organisation that hasn’t really got their shit together. Because nothing needs to be put together in two days. They could have come up with this pitch proposal process, request for ideas, well in advance. And if it’s left to the last minute, that’s kind of a red light for me.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, it’s such an indicator of what they’d be like to work with. It’s like if you’re this chaotic when you have all the time to think about it and get, invite agencies to pitch and get a proper process together, like just imagine what it’s like when we actually start doing work. So it’s a good, yeah, good piece of advice that it’s like you consider it a red flag for working with a company for sure.

Mark Perkins:
Yeah, sometimes as well, you know, we get, this happens quite frequently, a request to submit the RFP, which is essentially a pitch document. All the thinking is in there and it’s all written up. And then a pitch two weeks later. So you’re under real pressure to get the RFP in on a deadline. Sometimes in a portal there’s a cut-off point. And you get to the pitch two weeks later and it’s blatantly apparent that no one’s actually read it. So why did we need to do all of that effort? It didn’t make sense. So yeah, sometimes it’s just completely unnecessary. And it kills the kind of spirit of getting things done and doing the best possible work if you’ve got what you think you know is an unnecessary deadline.

Louise Parker:
When you are on the pitch itself, the client is tapping on a laptop, they’re on their phone, they might even be wearing glasses, sunglasses, not glasses, glasses are fine, sunglasses the entire time. All things that we’ve heard people having experience of, what are your general thoughts on that? Is them doing other bits and bobs of work acceptable when you’re doing, going through your pitch ideas?

Mark Perkins:
I’m old school, so no, but we did a pitch recently for a famous global brand where we had eight people in the room and presenting to and all but two were working on their laptops, not taking notes, they were working, head down, didn’t even acknowledge us, and when questions came at the end, they kind of looked up and went, what? No, no questions. But I see it increasingly with… young people, where a laptop and a phone is almost like an additional limb and it’s just become the norm to be checking messages, responding to messages, possibly even looking at Instagram during a pitch. Yeah, my boss, Sian, years ago in a pitch, we went up to Norfolk and this is 2000s and someone was looking at his phone and she stopped and she said, excuse me, do you want to check your phone outside because I want to talk to everyone else. Oh my God. Wow. But the guy shrank. Yeah. But, you know, she thought that we accorded more respect, you know, for doing two weeks worth of work and traveling up to Norwich and this person to be looking at their phone.

Stephen Baker:
I’ve got huge, huge respect for that because I probably am guilty of it myself in certain meetings where I’m so, particularly after the pandemic where I was so sort of insular with like tabs open and my phone was like a sort of bit of a lifeline to the outside world. So I’ve become more rather than less addicted to it, but try and sort of stop that as much as possible and give people the respect they deserve. And calling it out is the only way it will kind of change or get better, but I accept it too often as a norm for sure.

Mark Perkins:
I think that time has gone now. I think it has become the norm. But it’s really frustrating, especially if you want to make eye contact, you want to focus on certain people and if they’re only half listening. Because we wouldn’t be presenting at the same time whilst checking our Slack.

Stephen Baker:
No, that’s true.

Louise Parker:
So the scenario is you’ve done your pitch, you’ve spent all that time in the run-up to it, it’s gone seemingly well and then you’re waiting to hear from them and you hear nothing ever. They have ghosted you. One, has that ever happened to you? And two, what are your thoughts on it?

Mark Perkins:
It’s happened a fair few times. Not for a long time, though. Yeah, I can’t remember a time recently we’ve been ghosted. I’ve heard lots of horror stories of those that have. You kind of get a sense of a client, first of all. There was one client, I wouldn’t say they ghosted us. The pitch had gone so well, and I guess this is another kind of irritation of pitches, that hadn’t really been as as profound and explicit as this one. We did the pitch, we did a tissue session which had gone really well, did a pitch, and at the end of the pitch she just went, oh my God, you guys nailed it. That was brilliant. Someone said, that was the best articulation of our brand I have ever heard and I have worked here 15 years. It was spot on. And I said, OK, great. And someone else said, we can’t wait to meet you guys for a drink. That was bang on, ideas amazing, strategy was great, so excited. And we said, are there any questions? No, no questions. Amazing. Nailed it. Well done. Thank you. And they said the decision would be made on Friday. Friday came and went. On the Monday, I emailed, nothing, called, nothing. And eventually, I think they said, can we speak next Friday? So it was a week later decision. And it actually decided to go with someone else. What? So, yeah, so that was actually worse than being ghosted. I think it was this idea of, you know, it was like being stood up at the altar.

Louise Parker:
Well, I think you’ve been love bombed. That is love bombing. Yeah. That’s the client version of love bombing.

Mark Perkins:
I’m too old to know what love bombing is.

Louise Parker:
It’s basically showering you in, you’re the best person ever, you’re incredible, let’s get married, all this kind of stuff, and then just, you know, being like, oh, actually, no, let’s break up. And you’ve just kind of, you’ve been brought up to that high and then brought back down again. So it’s exactly what happened to you in a client sense.

Mark Perkins:
We were love-bombed. It was the fact that we had to chase to get that response. And clearly, in their own words, they found someone that they fell in love with just a little bit more than us, which is more calling. So I think part of that is actually, from a client point of view, they needed to manage their feedback better because, you know, they’d shouted us for some praise, you know, I think was possibly warranted. It was a very good pitch, but I think, you know, from a sort of client discipline, they needed to be more tempered in their feedback because then they set us up for a massive fall. And I think coming second in that situation was worse than, much worse than being ghosted or being told we were terrible. It was that tantalising glimpse of, yeah, let’s work together and can’t wait to meet you for drinks.

Stephen Baker:
Mark, thank you for indulging us there with a number of new business scenarios that we’ve seen and heard about. I’m jumping around in terms of the questions we wanted to ask you, but I wanted to ask, imagine PR utopia. What would be your ideal new business pitch process from beginning to end? We talked a lot about the gripes and the need for time and things like that, but if you were to set the whole thing, your absolute dream, what would it look like?

Mark Perkins:
I think a great brief written with a clear, concise set of objectives. When you get to ask questions, which is pre-tissue, they give robust, considered answers. Sometimes, not all the time, far from it, but sometimes you get the sense that when you send questions over, it’s kind of done in five minutes as an afterthought, or they’re almost irritated they have to do a bit more work having written the brief, but actually this was all part for you know, us to do something great for you. You’ve asked us, you’ve invited us to think about your business and your challenges and therefore we’re going to ask more questions about how we can do that. So that’s the first part of collaboration and having a tissue session, as I said, stress test and honestly tell us what you like and what you don’t like and how we can build upon that. The number of agencies as well. The maximum ideally would be one, but a maximum of no more than four agencies. I’m very reluctant to pitch, certainly if it’s more than five, because what criteria are they setting for the agencies? I’d like to think that someone actually wants to work with you because they’ve seen what you do as an agency, as a body of work. a set of values and a culture, and they think, I’d like to work with these people, I’d be curious to know. And if they’re working with 10 or 12 agencies they’re approaching, they’re just kind of maybe looking at awards lists and being really lazy, like, oh, that one, that one, that one, that one. But you’re making lots of people do lots of work, and it just becomes a shootout, and it’s exhausting. So the idea that they’ve done that due diligence on an agency they think is already going to be a good fit for them. So good questions to ask and get a good response from. And if they’re thoughtful, you know, what’s the worst idea we could suggest? Because when they think about it properly and give you an answer, you’ve got a good idea then of what good and great looks like and areas of interest. And I think being able to go in with a clear set of ideas and actually leave them wanting more. I think if a client’s expecting a 12-month program to be what you get after a two-week intensive round of putting together a presentation, a pitch. It’s more about they buy into, so at the beginning, they buy into the strategy, they buy into the people, they buy into the thinking and not think that that is it and everything is set in stone because they’re buying into the people and what they’ve offered already and thinking there’s potential to do something even better. And finally, whether you’ve won or not, but especially if you haven’t won or not, great feedback. Because you do so much work and there’s so much anticipation, excitement, endeavour, blood, sweat and tears that goes into a pitch. And if they just say, oh, you were a close second, thank you. But yeah, but give me more than that. Why weren’t we first? What was it that made the other ones first? You don’t have to tell us their ideas, but you know, was it us? You know, was it the chemistry? So you want to know because it’s a return on investment. You’re not on the business, but at least you know in future, whether it’s working with them or someone else, what areas you can fine tune and make yourself better.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, that’s a really, really good point. Like I said, even if it’s kind of bittersweet because you haven’t won it, it could just be simple things that you can make tweaks to, or it can be larger things that you can really consider as, I guess, an agency going forward if you want to change up stuff based on that feedback maybe, who knows. But yeah, it’s really I look forward to receiving that feedback even if we haven’t won the business because I just think, like you said, it’s a good return and it’s something that you can gain from it. If it’s not going to be the work itself, at least you get that feedback. You didn’t mention in that around, yeah, and the utopia would be that we are paid to do that pitch work. Is that something that you would like in a pie in the sky world? Do you think it’s actually feasible? Have you had that? Have you been paid to do a new business pitch?

Mark Perkins:
Yes, only once that comes to memory, actually twice. When I was at W, I think it was Betfair paid for a proposal, which had to come back, the pitch had to be back in video formats. Actually, there was a lot of work that went into that. So that was, I think, justified. But last year we pitched for Asics, the running shoe company, and they gave us a really good brief. And Caroline Fisher was the point person there. She gave us lots of time for feedback, thinking, briefing and we were paid handsomely for our time and we didn’t win. but I think therefore there was a lot more respect from them for us getting into the process, understanding what we’re going to do, but actually the recognition that I think there were only two or three other agencies that we were all going to really go, I wouldn’t say harder or work harder because we were being paid for it, but I just thought the fact that the client really wanted to invest in it, not just in time, but recognising we were going to be working for weeks, that we gave our best.

Louise Parker:
Yeah, I think it’s a very ethical thing to do. I would like to think that the more ethical brands out there would be considering that as well, because it probably matches up with their values more so. I don’t know if that is the case, but that would be nice.

Mark Perkins:
So I was going to give an example. We pitched recently six agencies to a well-known high street brand. They had two briefs. One was specific to them, a sort of a candour event. The second was they wanted a Christmas campaign. We were told in feedback that we’d won Christmas. But unfortunately, the owners changed his mind because they hadn’t done PR for a while. So they were only going to do the previous brief. So that was a whole waste of time doing Christmas. And then I saw that the campaign that was mooted, that they said was just an idea they couldn’t resist. I got in touch with a mate at the winning agency and said, I haven’t seen your campaign. He said, don’t talk to me about it. So they pulled it. The owner also decided that he didn’t want to do any PR. So that was six PR agencies going after two briefs. I calculated we probably spent from beginning to end, you know, research, ideating, writing up, presenting. 100 hours, but that’s 600 hours combined of agency time just flushed down the loo by a business that actually wasn’t that serious. I think what we need is some kind of cartel like Pablo Escobar where all the agencies get together. and just kind of call the shots, this is our minimum time, if you want to work PR you’re going to have to pay for it, or any creative communications.

Stephen Baker:
Imagine that, that actually sounds really dreamy to be fair.

Louise Parker:
It’s kind of like a unionisation in a way of agencies, it’s like if we all say we’re going to charge for it.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, everyone agrees. I think we’ve got time for a couple more questions, so one I wanted to ask was around, well, you’re very eloquent, you’re very experienced, you’ve obviously done a lot of new business pitches, but one thing that always amazes me is how kind of, I don’t know, nervous people get when they’re pitching. And I wondered if you had any advice for people who are starting their career in PR, or maybe you’ve never been involved in a new business pitch process before, and they’re sort of, they’re feeling quite anxious about the process. Do you have any any things you do, any routines you go through to kind of relax yourself, get yourself in the zone and just feel confident going into the room or Zoom. Sorry, that was an awful rhyme at the end. I was always really nervous.

Mark Perkins:
There’s so much public speaking, I’ve done some of that, but with the pitch situation, you’re setting yourself up for fear about fluffing your lines. That’s the important thing. So what if I look like an idiot? What if I forget? And I’ve seen people dry up and it is genuinely awful when you feel for them. They can’t suddenly find the words. The worst thing, they either dry up or they just start speaking in tongues and just blabbering about anything that comes into their head and it’s just, it looks like they’ve taken acid. I always used to write loads and loads of notes down, different colour biros. I was a lot more junior. And I’d have them and I’d try and memorise them. They were almost like a security blanket, comfort blanket. And then one pitch I went to, I left my notes on the train. I said, fuck, what am I going to do? I’m still going to have to present. And I just told myself, well, actually, these are your ideas. That’s your colleague’s idea. You know the brand. If we can talk about two weeks, you know it. And as a result of that, I just kind of had a zen moment. When it got to me, I just thought, you know it. And I just said it flawlessly and with fewer nerves than I’d ever had before. So now I sometimes still write down notes and stuff. But actually, I do very little preparation. But I think that comes from experience. I’d certainly say never do any preparation. Always make sure you know what you’re going to say, but the fact is that if you do know what you’re going to say, it’s in there. It’s just about getting yourself in a relaxed state to do it. So be prepared, but don’t think that it’s all going to fall apart. If you know it and you’re prepared, you can say it. I think they talk about it in psychology, positive visualisation. They do things like telling footballers or golfers, you know, imagine yourself just scoring the goal, it’s the same thing. Just like, you know what you’re going to say, imagine saying it. And so when you kind of put yourself in that zone, that’s how I do it. I didn’t know what it was called at the time, but that’s how I got around it, positive visualisation.

Stephen Baker:
Yeah, that’s really useful, I think, because I think people, yeah, I definitely get the build-up of, what’s the word, adrenaline. I never felt like super nervous, like I was really gonna like cock it up, but I always got that kind of like adrenaline going. But for me, what I always did was just have the first thing I wanted to say, like written down, almost like the first sentence. Because once I started, then I was away, it was always that sort of build-up to the first thing you’re gonna say, just in case it was like, and now over to our head of PR, Steve Bacon, it was like, good day, or you know, say something really bizarre for no reason. But some really good tips there.

Louise Parker:
A question we’re asking all of our guests, and your answer doesn’t have to necessarily be about the new business process. It can be very open if you want. But the question is, what do you want to see more of in the digital PR or the PR industry? And what do you want to see less of?

Mark Perkins:
Oh, that’s a good question. I think we hit upon it earlier. I’d love to say, and this is a utopian thing, it’s not going to happen. I’d love to see agencies paid for time invested in pitching. Ad agencies get paid. Architects get paid when they’re commissioned to come up with buildings. So it would be good to see some kind of acknowledgement of that. What would I like to see less of? From a personal point of view, bugbear of mine is when, and this will probably be prevalent in digital if not more so as well, the reach of billions figure. So when the campaign is evaluated and it had a reach of 115 billion and The population of the world is 8 billion, so that assumes that the population of the world has been smacked with this campaign 10 times around the face. Unnecessary evaluation and measurements that always comes in billions. I know how it’s calculated. Just because you get a piece in Mail Online, it doesn’t mean that everyone who read Mail Online that month happened to read that one article. Mail Online has a reach of 100 million, but sometimes some pages are only read by hundreds of people. But yeah, no one reveals the dark arts of the metrics of reach.

Louise Parker:
Wonderful. Well, thank you very much for joining us. It’s been very, very interesting. Do you have anything you would like to plug in terms of how are you hiring, for example, or anything that you would just like to talk about about self-promotion?

Mark Perkins:
Well, maybe if this has gone badly, we might be hiring for my replacement. We’re always hiring and we’re always looking for doctors, young, eager talent, but also old, eager talent. I think we’re hiring for an account manager at the moment. And also we’re growing our social team. So everything we do is integrated. We started with PR agencies, so we cover live events, social content. We have our own studio. with creative and strategy at its heart. So if that sounds interesting or intriguing, we’re always welcome to have people drop in, learn a bit more about the agency.

Louise Parker:
Lovely. Well, I’m sure we will put some information around your website and maybe your Twitter profile so people can get in touch if they want to get some more information on that kind of stuff. But otherwise, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Stephen Baker:
Thank you, Mark. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you. It’s been a joy.