We’re chuffed to bits to have won the pitch for The Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC).

It was a four way pitch, primarily for the redesign of the secc.co.uk business to business site. We’ll now be working closely with the SECC’s marketing, commercial and technical teams to review the site’s information architecture and navigation, to reinterpret the SECC brand and to introduce a range of new event planning features.

We’ve been doing a fair bit of interesting work in B2B sectors recently, and this is no exception – a range of internal stakeholders and a series of target audience segments all of whose goals and objectives need to be reconciled via a single site.

Sean Murray and the team at SECC have an ambitious vision for the venue and the brand, and there are some exciting projects in the pipeline.

Its helps a lot to be working on behalf of a “product” that is world class. For the 2nd year in a row, the SECC has just won BEST UK CONFERENCE VENUE 2009 at the industry leading M&IT Awards in London (23 Feb 2009).

As well as the main B2B site, the SECC also operates the ticket sales websites secctickets.com and secxtra.com.

Watch this space for details of the new site when it launches.

The Royal Television Society’s RTS Futures team hosted their How To Pitch 2 event at BAFTA last night.

A distiguished panel comprising the CEO of Endemol UK, the Director of Television, Channels & Online at ITV, the Head of Factual Features at talkbackTHAMES, and the Deputy Head of Features at Channel 4 all talked about how to prepare for, to give, and to receive idea pitches.

I went along because we increasingly find ourselves pitching speculative ideas to multi-platform and non-broadcast specialists at TV companies, as well as providing digital marketing services to advertisers.

It was an entertaining evening – Tim Hincks of Endemol was a very good, witty Chair – and there were some good anecdotes and soundbites. It was certainly worth devoting an hour to.

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, there were few surprises. Pitching programme ideas to commissioners is much the same as pitching communication ideas to advertisers.

• Get a good title for the idea and encapsulate it in a sentence (what would be its Radio Times billing?)
• People commission people as much as they commission ideas.
• Originality is not the be all and end all if you have a compelling angle, passion for the idea and if the execution is brilliant.
• Pitching is about listening as much as talking.
• Not “hermetically sealing” an idea but leaving room for input and builds.
• Talking about ideas is the highlight of the commissioner’s day.
• Being passionate about your ideas…
• …but accepting that there are dozens of reasons for a pitch to fail that have nothing to do with the quality of the idea or the presentation.

Overall the evening reinforced the view that the most interesting conferences and seminars are those that sit outside your immediate industry sector or discipline. It reminded me of a lucky break I had whilst at Leith when I attended a customer service conference with a colleague from our Cello sister company TMI. I’ve used far more material from that conference in subsequent presentations than I’ve taken from most advertising/marketing equivalents.