Work from the Never Produced File

When you've been in the business as long as I have, you have the opportunity to participate in many new business pitches. Occasionally, you even get to pitch the same piece of business more than once.

My memory is a little fuzzy, but I think I pitched Pizza Hut about 38 times. 

Then again, given they're proclivity for agency hopping and brilliant pizza communications strategy (see Figure A.) who hasn't.

Figure A.

I've also had the pleasure of pitching Barnes and Noble twice. Once, in the pre-Bezos era, before brick and mortar became sick and mortal. 

And later when B&N found itself competing against Amazon in strip malls for the coffee clatch crowd who found the online book buying experience as rewarding as buying a jug of cleaning vinegar.

It was during the second pitch that we, my partner Jean Robaire and I, came up with a campaign that made  us happy, but made the hopeful agency nervous and anxious about their decision to book us in the first place. 

We had been told that B&N had invested significant amounts of money in their lounging facilities. That is, they brought in fancy furniture, big comfy chairs, barristas, free snacks, anything and everything to put the  B&N customer at ease. And hopefully spend more time in their stores. 

Ideally, whipping out their credit card or iPhones to make all kinds of impulse purchases. Of course you need a schpelunking reading-light headband. How have you survived this long without one?

I suppose we could've prepared scripts and mood boards of smiling happy people splayed out on big leather couches, gobbling up Faulkner and some fresh baked blueberry muffins. But we chose to go a different route and focused our attention on Jenny and Jeff, two Barnes and Noble staffers who just wanted to close up shop at 9 o'clock and go home.

But they couldn't.

Because the returning loyal B&N customers would never leave. 

They would linger, browse, kibbitz and make themselves "at home" (as the brief suggested) but they would never look up at the clock, or the dimming lights, and get the hint to am-scray. Our proposed tagline:

Barnes & Noble

At some point, you have to leave.

You could describe it as the Maytag Repairman approach. (You kids will have to look that up.)

I'm not sure if our work ever made it into the pitch. Nor am I convinced Barnes & Noble would've had the courage to put the necessary money behind prematurely curmudgeonly Jenny & Jeff.

I am positive however, that had we the opportunity to execute and produce the work as presented, including some obligatory bite/smile/browse footage, it would've been more memorable than anything B&N did produce. 

But just as bacon has taken a back seat to crust in Pizza Hut's Bacon Stuffed Crust Pizza, memorability did not seem all that important to Barnes & Noble. 

Or anyone else, these days.