Moneysupermarket and its agency, MCBD, must be disappointed by the lukewarm reaction to their new Omid Djalili campaign.  I think I know what’s gone wrong:  they’ve made what’s usually (though not always), a mistake, and gone ahead and shot the script that MCBD presented in the pitch.

I guess there’s some empirical evidence for this, in that the pitch wasn’t very long ago and here’s the film already, but actually it’s the nature of the execution itself that arouses my suspicions.

When you’re pitching, you’re under huge pressure of time, and you have to cut corners somewhere.  If you think of the creative development process as basically a game of three halves – developing a nice strong original insight, coming up with a big idea and then, usually, showing how it can play out across an integrated campaign – then at least one of those halves is going to get a lot less than a third of the time available, if you see what I mean.

The new campaign has been congratulated for its insight – namely, that we Brits don’t like to haggle.  It may well have taken some time to get there.  If I then had the responsibility of taking this insight forward into a TV execution, and only had a week, say, or indeed a day, or even possibly an hour, to do so, I would write a script with a presenter in it, because they’re the easiest when there’s quite a lot to say and nothing much to look at;  I’d choose a comedian as my presenter, because what else can you do except try to be funny;   and I’d look for a comedian from a culture where we think people are good at haggling, so that he can act as a sort of ironic contrast to us hopeless Brits.

I don’t think anyone actually knows exactly where Omid Djalili comes from, and if they knew he was from Iran I’m not sure if that would connect perfectly with the haggling thing (aren’t they more about ayatollahs, nuclear weapons and stoning adulterers?).  But hey, he’s some kind of Middle East guy and they all haggle over there – remember the gourd-buying scene in Life of Brian?

Anyway, hey presto, a TV script, and hopefully the pitch timetable is back on track.  (What we can’t tell at this stage is how much time there was left to think through the whole campaignability/integration issue:  will future executions feature more of  Omid Djalili, for example, or will the campaign include other celebs from perceived haggling cultures like maybe Zinedine Zidane and King Abdullah of Jordan?   And what will happen in print, online and other media?  Will small-space mono press ads feature small and blurry photos of Omid, who at that size and resolution will look pretty much indistinguishable from Alexei Sayle?  Or will the strapline A Great Deal Easier – more than a little uncomfortably close to Direct Line’s A Great Deal Better, I’d say – act as a focal point for a much looser kind of integration?  We just don’t know.) 

We also don’t know if I’m right to build this tottering tower of speculation about what happened in the pitch process, and subsequently.  But what we do know is that nine times out of ten, for all the talk of selecting the right firm, and the right team, for a long-term business partnership, pitches are in fact painting competitions where the clients will choose the agency that comes up with the idea closest to what they think they’re looking for.

Nevertheless, very often, things happen subsequently which send the agency back to the drawing board – the idea researches badly, the Chairman doesn’t like it, it’ll cost too much to shoot, the brief changes, whatever.  But occasionally, the pitch work slips straight through into a finished execution without touching the sides.  And while it will occasionally be brilliant, more often than not it’ll have that moneysupermarket-like slightly-half-baked air.