Ben Welsh’s The Pitch is the story of Dan Atkins, ECD at Sydney advertising agency ADD as he navigates several minefields. One, concerns an RFP for an ad campaign for the Prime Minister’s Office in Canberra. Elections are coming up and his advisors are telling him that Climate Change is an increasingly hot button issue with voters and that his favorables are not, well, favorable. And, it turns out, that’s for good reason; he doesn’t believe in climate change (“You know, POTUS told me that the whole thing is a massive PR exercise by the nuclear power industry”). Not coincidentally, the PM is “supported” by three very wealthy coal mining concerns. But because his ambition trumps his beliefs – and because, as he tells the coal mining concerns later, if they can get ahead of it with an ad campaign and a few grants, they can still do nothing substantial about it – he approves the brief, which is sent to Dan’s agency and another shop.
Now right there, people with a moderate intellectual capacity will suss out a paradox and be confused. “He wants to buy an advertising campaign that will fail? That can’t be right. Because that’s insane.” But as every adworker who reads that scenario will know, that’s just another day at the office. Right? Right.
While Dan maneuvers through that, he also has several other issues to deal with. Like the bad client who does bad work and who treats the staff badly – and who has just put their business into review because they’re “not satisfied”. Like the young creative team who are eager and edgy – exactly what every agency says they want – that Dan has to figure out how to channel in to work clients might actually buy. Like the business partner trying to backchannel a relationship (and a brief) with a major car company, an activity that hangs, like a carrot on a stick, agonizingly out of reach of the agency and their bottom line. And like the myriad personal relationships – or just sexual encounters (or “wished-for” sexual encounters) – among the staff, the general public and of course, the main character.
And there’s also a reoccurring…. Um… little person. He’s a figment of Dan’s imagination. We think. Sometimes he’s accompanied by a penguin. We encounter them in the first pages of the book when Dan is still in Cannes, but he (or they) pop up at inopportune moments throughout the book (sometimes with more friends and relatives), reminding Dan to stop wasting his time (on work, on women, on wine) and get back to writing his movie script. Because, you know, every creative is writing a movie. Or a novel. Or something. It’s like a lifeline we hold on to when we’re dealing with the idiocy of advertising life (pitches, co-workers, clients), but which most of us (Fitzgerald, Rushdie, Geisel excepted) never actually complete.
Welsh weaves all of these stories across 190 pages with the kind of deft (cynics would say “facile”) skill one would expect of a lauded copywriter who’d climbed up the ranks of Australia’s most feted agencies. As he does, he lets the book’s point of view swivel around – sometimes we’re in the deep recesses of the Prime Minister’s office in Canberra, sometimes we’re in Dan’s office in Sydney, sometimes we’re in a café with the figment and the penguin, sometimes we’re somewhere else. And if that’s confusing and disorienting to people outside of the industry, well anyone inside of it will recognize it for the table stakes it is.
If that sounds like a lot, well it is, because the challenge Mr. Welsh has set himself, it appears to us, is threefold. At times, he wants to write a sort of black comedy about the advertising world, using the RFP for a campaign that could literally save the world, as the centerpiece. At other times, he wants to sincerely promote the challenges that climate change presents us with (in addition to having helmed agencies such as MC Saatchi and DDB in Australia, Mr. Welsh has a degree in Oceanography and Applied Biology). And at other times he wants to write a sort of contemporary Mad Men, an insightful portrait of the industry that he has spent much of his life in.
That these challenges don’t always align does not preclude The Pitch from delivering some valuable nuggets for each. For the first, it’s hard to beat Mr. Welsh’s line about the Cannes Creativity Festival: “It was perfectly placed on the Cannes calendar between the film and porn festivals.” Which I’m not sure is true, but probably should be.
For the second, the Mr. Welsh notifies us of the fact that “Australia’s… commitment to net zero depends on unproven technology. It remains among the bottom ten countries in the latest 2021 Climate Change Performance Index, ranking 54th and with an overall ‘very low’ rating.”
And for the third, here are three lines that, if they don’t make you feel seen, should be woven into your Power Point presentations until they do: “Originality, the driving force of any self-respecting creative, wasn’t just very hard to sell, it was very hard to buy” and “Research was what turned originality into familiarity” and our personal favorite “Money is energy.” Which, of course, it is.
The value of books like these – advertising industry novels – when they work, is, for people in the industry, a validation of recognition. When you see things in print that you have lived through countless times and suddenly realize that it’s not just you, it’s the nature of this beast, it doesn’t so much make it “okay”, as much as shift how you process it. Shift from some sort of internal failing which you think you should be able to “fix”, to an external force, which, with enough training (and likely therapy and whiskey) you can eventually just brush past.
For example there’s a scene at the very end of the book which we can’t tell you about but which rings so true to the way agencies and clients and pitches work that everyone who has ever been one will likely find themselves howling in sympathetic frustration.
The value to people not in the industry is probably somewhat less. But at least those people will know why some of their friends are howling.
The Pitch by Ben Welsh was published by Tablo Publishing on 11/22/2021 – order it from Amazon here, or Barnes & Noble here, or pick it up at your local bookseller (find one here).
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