Facebook Live - The new avenue for pitching business 

The evolution of Digital Media has disrupted plenty of businesses, transforming processes and making way for new age means. Digital Marketing thrives on the expanse of this medium and it is rather surprising that agencies which devise innovative and out of the box campaigns for their clients underrate the importance of this medium to pitch and acquire new business from brands.

If you are an agency owner/business development manager/key accounts at an Agency, this use case of Facebook Live might just be the Food for thought for your next pitch.

The Open Brief

Breaking the norms of conventional pitch processes in the digital age,  Ankur Warikoo, Founder & CEO at nearbuy (formerly Groupon India) resorted to Facebook Live for a reverse pitch calling out agencies to help build brand nearbuy.

The Brief might not tick out all the check boxes of a traditional brief / RFP from a client but Ankur covered almost everything the pitching agency needs to know.

TG -

Age Group - 24-35

Gender Split - 60% Men 40% Women

Income Bracket - 6-10 Lacs a year

Working Professionals from Top 9 Cities

Ankur clearly stated that the brand wants to get rid of the deal and discounts positioning as that's the kind of positioning that will make people use nearbuy only on occasions and they want to build nearbuy as an offering which could be used every day.

The Live video was an instant hit with responses pouring in from nooks and corners of the country. Ankur’s remark that he has a thing for underdogs and creative startups got the pitching mills up and running. I am sure they must have received over 100+ Pitches within the stipulated deadline and a lot more thereafter.

The Perfect Pitch

For any big, mid-size agency it is not difficult to find a direct contact with Ankur or the brand team at nearbuy and figure possibilities of a meeting to put forth their approach as opposed to a ppt/pdf lying in the inbox of brand@nearbuy.com and that’s how traditional pitches work. I won't get into the details of a business development funnel for agencies but the two factors which hold utmost importance in an Agency Pitch are

1. Relationship and Rapport with the client

2. Cost of granular understanding and delivering solutions with creativity

The second factor is subjective but it is critical, if you have a hang of these two then the journey from hot leads to business closed would be much smoother.

Coming back to the nearbuy open brief, the founders, creative directors, and business teams must have spent a great amount of time in cracking the perfect pitch with due weightage to the factor 2 stated above, they totally miss out on factor 1 which is the premise for a real and authentic conversation about business. This is where Mahesh Chauhan (Ex Group CEO, Rediffusion) found his opportunity to introduce himself and the agency Salt Brand Solutions with this live video that can’t be categorized as a pitch but a pre-cursor to pitch

Known as Mash in the industry circles, Mahesh is a seasoned professional with over 20+ years of experience in the business of advertising and marketing. This pre-pitch video should inspire the existing digital marketing agencies and professionals to find more innovative ways and means to pitch.

We would love to facilitate this direct engagement between brands and agencies. So, if you're interested in reaching out to a brand which is inaccessible, use Facebook Live and tag the brand or shoot a video with your pre-pitch and share it with us at team@socialsamosa.com. We would definitely do our bit to make sure that the video reaches the right people at the right time. On another note, if you have similar pitch instances to share, drop them in comments here or write to us.

Happy Pitch Season ahead!