Those who toil in the world of Advertising and PR will appreciate Steve Hall's blog called Adrants and will appreciate this story too.....
Pitching IBM With Porn
Totally off the record... I worked in business development for one of the first web design shops in Silicon Alley. It was 1995 and most blue chip companies were looking to land a corporate identity on the web.
We had been contacted 'at the eleventh hour' by IBM to participate in a pitch to assist them in building a web presence. Our team went to work for 48 straight hours, including two all nighters as this was only one of six pitches and RFP responses for that week, and pulled together a very impressive 2 hour presentation.
The next day 25 IBM "suits" come to our parent agency's theatre for the presentation and much to our surprise, Lou Gerstner himself,the company's famous CEO, also attended.
The presentation was opened by my boss and then handed off to me for the section about e-commerce and advertising. The first few screens were simple enough and straight forward jargon. Then we went live to the web in search for excellent examples of our theories in practice.
I was clearly and noticably apprehensive about what was to come, especially with the CEO front and center and many women present. The first site we displayed on a 6 ft. screen was a very popular pornography portal.
Needless to say there was an audible gasp from the audience at the sight of the graphic visuals of naked women with legs spread and such. My audience was clearly confused and in some respects not amused in the least...
I quickly and clearly outlined the business practices that were embraced on the page and begged folks not to concentrate too much on the questionable content displayed.
The rest of the meeting went as planned and we were informed that they would be visiting six other agencies and would contact us if we made the cut to the next round in three weeks.
Mr Gerstner himself came up to me after the presentation and told me that it took alot of nerve to give that presentation to an audience like us.
That evening we laughed so hard at some of the facial expressions seen and heard during that one part of our presentation. One week later we get a phone call from their SVP to tell us that we had literally blown the doors off our competitor's presentations and that not only did we make the cut - they were simply ending their search for an agency and selected us right there and then.
They were a happy client for 5 years.
5:32:00 PM 
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