It's a great way to learn something about pitching if you look like Don Draper, have a product that good (the carousel campaign) and you're an actor in a well-written, hit TV show.
You seem to be getting hung up on the fact that Draper isn't actually a startup founder pitching his own product to investors. That's almost completely irrelevant. He is definitely pitching the product. In this case, he simply happens to be pitching the product back to the company who made it.
Pitching and advertising, while they have their differences, are fundamentally about the same thing: getting people to believe a product can make their lives better. If, in addition to tossing out numbers, you can make your potential investors believe you know how to connect with your market and truly understand their needs, so much the better. It doesn't have to be in tear-jerker form like Draper's presentation: it's about knowing how to frame the product.
And sure, it's a TV show, but it happens to be a fairly exceptional TV show built on a great deal of wisdom about what makes people tick. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You're insisting there's mutual exclusion where it doesn't exist.
> But if you want to respond to me, respond to claims I've made instead of ones you said I've made, but didn't.
I pretty clearly used the words "you seem", as in, "this is what I think you're thinking." I'm not a mind reader, so I'm forced to make a guess. Based on your other comments, it seemed like a pretty reasonable one to me.
By the way, pitching in its everyday usage just means to sell someone on something, whether it's customers or investors. (Notice how salesmen are often described as making a "sales pitch".) Advertising is a special form of pitching to customers. Pitching in the entrepreneurial sense of talking to a roomful of investors is also a special form of pitching.
This is a YCombinator site, so when someone mentions pitching, there's a good chance they mean talking to a roomful of investors. But a lot of us also talk about pitching to customers.
Either way, I think the clip offers some insight in how to do both, even if it's exaggerated for dramatic effect.
The title suggests this is usefully related to pitching, as in, standing in front of a roomful of people trying to convince them to take your business, write you a big cheque, etc. In that sense, it's about informative as watching Gordon Gekko's famous scene for tips on how to address shareholders or Dwight Shrute for insight into motivating employees.
Yes. In that it might make you understand that you need to find your product's emotional appeal (if it has one) and play on that.
You don't have to @me, we aren't on twitter. Also I really don't understand the above sentence.
Others understood the post and that is why it got 82 votes.
82 people can just like the clip. I certainly do and I'm in violent agreement with the notion that connecting a product to a powerful emotion can be a great way to advertise it. There's also an element of fantasy in this - if you've ever pitched or thought about pitching anything to a potential client, investor or business partner, you wish you could close them like Don Draper, too. At the same time, I think it's a little naive to say 'this is how you pitch, bottle it and take it to the conference room with you'.
but i don't want to get into a debate over it.
Fair enough. But that's why this this is here, with the comment section, and all.
Then I must have misunderstood what you meant when you said he was pitching a new technology.
I advise you think a little longer before responding to any more posts. Its alright, it happens to the best of them.
Thanks, if we're exchanging advice, mine would be 'please don't be a condescending prat'.
"First rule in roadside beet sales, put the most attractive bets on top. The ones that make you pull the car over and go 'wow, I need this beet right now'. Those are the money beets."