Pitching live on television!

The US election is hotting up nicely with the infamous live televised debates. Daunting, to say the least, they are pitching at it’s rawest. Since the first one forty years ago, a disaster for sweating Nixon against the charisma of Kennedy, only Ronald Regan and Bill Clinton have truly mastered them.

As one pollster said all the campaign work and poll leads can be “wiped out in seconds”. No wonder the candidates went into training. Obama spent four days in special “debate camp” in Florida sparring with litigation lawyers. McCain’s sparring partner was a champion debating coach from a televangelist university.

They went head to head last week and most commentators felt Obama scored a narrow victory. In the Sunday Times, in Focus, they rated the performances on:

(1) MASTERY OF POLICY. (2) REBUTTING OPPONENT. (3) BODY LANGUAGE. (4) ADAPTABILITY. (5)LIKEABILITY. (6) TONE. (7) GAFFE AVOIDANCE. (8) HUMOUR.

Interestingly, only one of these, mastery of policy, relates purely to content or substance. This is in line with the take-out effect of communication described in Best Practice Guide, Content and Staging ( …looking at the relative effect of verbal, and non-verbal communication, only 8% is purely verbal !)

As ever, not so much what you say, as the way you say it.

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The Sarah Brown opening

PITCHES AND TROUGHS. 100 BEST PITCH STORIES

In the last post, ‘this week’s pitch in Manchester’, I anticipated that Gordon Brown’s speech would be well written, it was, and rehearsed, it was. What I had not anticipated, no-one had, was the power and surprise of the opening. Sarah Brown.

In the Best Practice Guide, ‘Rehearsal. The Discriminators’ (check it out), one of the eight key things to look for when evaluating a pitch:

……. A POWERFUL, ATTENTION-GETTING OPENING. “You never have a second chance to make a first impression” (Will Rogers). Assume prospect bases decision on first five minutes. Capture interest fast with wit and surprise……

The decision to open with Sarah Brown, and it may well have been hers, was brilliant and the impact easily met all the ‘criteria’ above. Some press comment; ‘In a surprise piece of stage-craft, Sarah came to the podium to rapturous applause’. ‘ Hearts melt as Sarah lends her man a charming hand’.

The value of the poweful opening in a pitch is twofold. It starts the task of captivating the audience emotionally and, sometimes overlooked, it boosts the following performers. There can be no doubt that Gordon’s, for him, excellent and confident delivery gained from the tremendous opening. This is reason enough to include it in the 100 Best.

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This week’s pitch in Manchester.

Three years ago at their Blackpool conference the Tory party faithful witnessed the five-way platform pitch that saw David “no-notes” Cameron, not the favourite, emerge as the leader elect. It was undoubtedly a masterly performance and, in a post in July, I included it in the 100 Best Pitches (Pitches and Troughs section.) It was not what he said, it was the way he said it.

This week in Manchester we will see Brown and his rival, or is it rivals, “pitched against each other in a battle for Labour hearts and minds”. (Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer.) It could be a fascinating contest.

Two years ago, also in Manchester, both David Miliband and Alan Johnson failed to rise to the occasion. They performed badly and seemingly lacked confidence. What will the outcome be this time when the stakes are so much higher?

Brown is fighting for his political life. Whilst world financial turmoil may give him some respite, he knows this speech will make or break him. Reports suggest it has been drafted, re-drafted endlessly and its content will no doubt be excellent. But can that be enough? A Downing Street aide apparently said “even if it’s Martin Luther King, some will say the speech wasn’t enough”.

So, one hell of a challenge to his confidence but maybe the battler’s instinct for survival will come through. In some ways the task of the young pretender, Miliband, could be as tough. So far his undoubted intellect has not been matched by communication skills that charm and inspire.

Alan Johnson, on the otherhand, has an easy charm that does engage. By claiming he is not a contender he has reduced the pressure on himself to perform. He might, therefore, be the only one who instils the confidence the party craves.

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Once upon a time……

They have always been there, of course, but over the last few months the “personal narrative” has become increasingly prominent in political reporting, particularly in USA. Squeezed between ‘style and substance’, or is it ‘policies and personality’, there is the narrative, the story.

You have McCain’s narrative of five years as tortured prisoner, Obama’s humble mixed race background and, most tellingly, Sarah Palin’s story, already several novels’ worth. In terms of coverage these stories are creating more attention than the policies, perhaps because they are more interesting ?

Apparently the Republican and Democrat campaign managers are finding it harder than ever to control their messaging where the free for all blogger environment is reducing the effectiveness of paid air-time. One tactic is to create controversial television commrecials but rather than air them commercially, rely on news and blogging ‘channels’, which prefer stories, to do the distribution job.

There is nothing new in this. The famous “Labour isn’t working ” poster, created by Saatchis some thirty years ago, ran for a few weeks only, on a dozen poster sites. It became the story. Picked up by all the news media, long before blogging, its impact on the election was immeasurable.

In any pitch storytelling compels.

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C..c..c..confidence.

The ‘sine qua non’ of any successful pitch, confidence.

Whether in politics, business, or pitching scripts in the extreme world of Hollywood, it is confidence that separates winners from losers. In an entertaining, perceptive paper, scriptwriter Matthew Faulk writes of his experiences pitching scripts to studio bosses where confidence is all:

“Executives smell fear. If they think I have the slighest doubt about what I’m pitching, they’ll pounce. Any idea you’re not quite sure about, they’re certainly not going to be sure about. Therefore, over-riding conviction about the idea is an absolute pre-requisite. This requires a great deal of rehearsal. I practice and practice. The words must come tripping easily off the tongue, for any hesitation will be interpreted as doubt or fear. And fear breeds fear.”

Faulk goes on to say that film executives are also nervous people. But then so are voters which is why, right now, the confidence of McCain, galvanised by Palin, is undermining Obama who has lost his. It is his ebullient confidence that carries all before him for Boris. It is Gordon Brown’s lack of it that makes life so tough for him and would-be supporters.

In business pitches the recipients, if not nervous, are apprehensive. The decisions they must take concern the future. Since this can never be certain, it is your confidence that will get their vote.

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