The Errant Æsthete

What do you know of the perfect pitch? Making a pitch is not just a matter of winning the pet-food account in an airless meeting room at one of those hotels where people conduct that sort of business. The whole of life is a pitch. Everything you do is a matter of presentation and persuation. Getting dressed. Dating, Lunch. Sending an e-mail.

This wonderful entry by Michael Beirut for design observer on the perfect pitch draws excerpts from AMC’s notoriously great new series “Mad Men.” Something to remember: “the perfect pitch does not take place in the library of the mind, it takes place in the theater of the heart.”

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. … Continue …