This is an exciting time for Pitch as we begin a new phase in our adventure.
I formed the agency back in 2002 as the UK’s first specialist sports consumer PR agency. Since then we have worked with clients from across the industry. We’ve been involved in the world’s biggest sporting events and represented some of the world’s most loved brands. We were particularly proud of our work for the London 2012 organising committee, as well as the launch of BT Sport in 2013. Working with Betfair to turn Britain’s greatest female Olympian, Victoria Pendleton, into a jockey at Cheltenham earlier this year was also quite a coup. But we are probably most proud of our involvement with Channel 4’s Paralympic Games campaign both in 2012 and again this year, which has transformed the UK’s perceptions of disability forever.
In the process we’ve received industry wide recognition, won multiple awards, made lots of friends and had the privilege of working with some brilliant clients. We’ve also had an amazing group of young people coming to work every day in Brewer Street. The cast list might have changed over the years, but the culture hasn’t, and this is probably our best achievement up to now.
But we don’t want to spend too much time looking in the rear view mirror, and instead, we are implementing a few changes for a new stage in our growth and evolution as an agency.
First of all we are changing our company name. Up to now we’ve been known of as Pitch PR. But we’ve been doing a much wider range of work than just PR for some time. Earlier this year we launched a dedicated sponsorship strategy and activation team, which is already creating great sponsorship campaigns for brands like Tag Heuer. So, we’ve formally changed our name to Pitch Marketing Group (although it’s OK for you to just call us Pitch if you wish).
Secondly, we have a bold and modern new brand identity, with our very own distinctive ‘P’. It’s been designed to look like a ‘play’ sign, because so much of what we do now is about the creation and distribution of video content (more about that in a minute). Our logo might never reach the same levels of recognition as the Nike ‘Swoosh’, but we like it nevertheless, and it looks pretty cool on our social media feeds (@pitchlondon in case you don’t follow us).
We are also unveiling a new brand promise – to create marketing campaigns that help our clients ‘be distinctive’. In increasingly cluttered marketing environments, brands need to be culturally relevant to cut through. This can be achieved through campaigns in sport, fashion, music and entertainment, or other things that consumers are genuinely into. But brands have been doing this for years, including many of our clients. So anyone who’s a football fan or a music lover will be inundated with commercial messages on TV, on their social feeds, at the game or gig. Which is why we say that, for today’s consumer, ‘life’s a pitch’. To overcome this challenge, we have created a unique playbook of how our clients can ‘be distinctive’ in order to pitch to consumers in a more effective way. The point is that to capture attention, brands don’t just need to be culturally relevant. They also need to stand out. But they shouldn’t try to be different for different’s sake. Instead they need to remain true to their own brand purpose, as well as finding ways to collaborate with audiences with authenticity and credibility. They also need to do something new or pioneering, that people haven’t seen before. All these things go into being distinctive. And we think if you can crack that, it’s one of the best routes to creating marketing that people love, and achieving real brand growth. Over the next few weeks our team will be writing their own blogs to explain more about brands being distinctive, and what it means for their particular marketing channel.
And lastly, we are launching a new team dedicated to content production – Pitch Productions. The focus is the creation of branded content for digital and social media channels. This is being headed up at the outset by our Creative Director, Steve Munachen, although we are currently recruiting someone to lead the division. More on that in the next few weeks. We’ve already got a full time team of 4 designers, film makers and multi-media producers, and are super excited about the opportunity ahead.
So, as we move forwards with our new company name, our new identity and positioning, and three different, dedicated areas of expertise in Partnerships, PR and Productions, we hope you now know who to call if you are looking for your brand to be distinctive.
