Beyond Knowledge

This year 31 Executives, Planners and Managers from all over the agency took part in OMD’s Beyond Knowledge training programme.

As two jubilant members of the winning pitch team, we wanted to share our first-hand experience with you.

All our hard work culminated with the big finale – the pitch. This was an intense four weeks of working on a live Heinz brief, ending with a presentation to the client and members of the OMD board. The best is yet to come – celebrating, in typical OMD style, with drinks. In the meantime, here are some of our highlights.

Pitch Talk

4 weeks, 1 brief, 5 teams, £500,000, 700,000 tomato seeds and 775k Heinz Tomatoes bottles …

Having been divided up into teams, the brief landed and we quickly got to work, following FLOW, the agency’s ten-stage planning process.

After interrogating the brief through Active Briefing, we humanised our business objectives which was surprisingly challenging. Our next step was Insights Discovery, selecting the most relevant insights to help profile our target audience. This, in turn, helped us form our Comms Task & Comms Strategy. Then came the Ideas Factory; brainstorming with the team and using our insights to shape our idea.

As D-Day approached, we hit PANIC STATIONS. All hands were on (the) deck. At this stage, our mentor’s feedback was invaluable. A huge thank you to Steve Eastwood & Tobie Rhodes for their time, and who’s mantra was we cannot tell you the answer, we can only guide you. What do you think?” – frustrating, but pushed us to think outside of the box and made us work that much harder.

Our Beyond Knowledge survival guide:

  • Organisation & Time Management – we organised meetings after work, communicated regularly over email to ensure we were talking in between meetings and used agency tools and resources to our advantage
  • Patience – we learned that insights and strategy take time, and a perfect deck cannot be created overnight
  • Creativity & Confidence – if you like an idea, go with it, build on it and link back to your insights at all times
  • Enjoy it – although we worked extremely hard, we kept a positive mindset throughout and definitely had a few laughs along the way.

A special thank you to the Beyond Knowledge organisers for making this happen: Rhian Feather, Paul Baker, Sara Ramadhen & Anthony Macro

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