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Bad reasons for losing a pitch - Number 2: Accidentally appearing in The Sun

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I was standing in the baked goods aisle in Sainsbury's around 10.30 one Saturday morning when my phone rang. I was surprised to see it was one of our directors calling.

When I answered, an excited voice asked "have we won the Norwich Union pitch'? We'd done the presentation a few days earlier, and we were waiting to hear the result. I said I hadn't heard anything, had he had a call? 'No' came the reply - 'I'm in the bookies, I've just seen The Sun and our creative work is all over page 9'.

I wandered down to newspapers, and sure enough, on a double page spread, was our pitch work. The campaign used Alan Partridge (famously a son of North Norfolk, hence the Norwich link), the scripts were excellent (Armando Ianucci may disagree but we loved them), and clearly The Sun liked them because they had all our jokes and more writ large.

It was just that the client hadn't appointed us yet, let alone agreed the campaign.

I still don't know how they got them - I doubt a leak from the agency, nor from the agent who we'd dealt with many times before on multiple celebrity campaigns. The finger of suspicion pointed firmly at a respondent from qualitative research - we'd tested the work in groups before presenting it to the client. But who knows. Script left on the bus?

I do know we had a very awkward call with the pitch consultant around 9am on the Monday morning.

And we didn't win.

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