Most pitches are built in the exact wrong order, and you can feel it the second you sit through one. It's all production, no script.

Here's how a pitch usually gets made. Someone opens the design tool. They pull last year's deck, swap the numbers, update the logos, drop in a few activation ideas, the same ones everyone's seen for five or six years. It looks good. It's polished. And right at the end, someone tries to tie it all together with a line about story, stapled on top like a bow.

That's backwards. And backwards is why so many pitches feel like a pile of nice-looking parts that don't add up to anything.

And before anyone says it: I know not every deal has time for this. Targets are real, volume is real, and not every pitch can get this kind of attention. That's the job, and I'm not pretending otherwise. But if even a third of your biggest pitches were built the other way round, they'd stand out a mile. That's the whole ask.

The right way round

The story comes first. Before a single slide.

Once you actually have the story, the real thing your world and the brand's world share, everything else stops being a guess. The activations become obvious, because they come straight out of the story. The slides know what they're there to say. The order writes itself, because there's one thread running through the whole thing.

When the story leads, every choice has something to answer to. You stop asking "is this a cool idea?" and start asking "does this serve the story?" And that one question quietly makes half your decisions for you. The clever activation that doesn't fit gets cut. The slide that's just there to fill space goes. What's left is a pitch that actually holds together, because one thing is holding it up.

A good story doesn't box in the creative work. It produces it.

Think about a film

You can have the best cinematographer alive. The best score. Stunning effects. The most famous cast on the planet. And still make something nobody remembers, if the script isn't there. We've all sat through those films. Huge budget, beautiful to look at, completely hollow.

Then there are films made for almost nothing that stay with people for years, because the story underneath was true and tight.

No director picks the camera angles before there's a script. No composer writes the music before they know what the film is even about. The craft exists to serve the story, and it can only be good once the story is good.

A pitch is no different. The slides and the activations are the production. The story is the screenplay. A beautiful pitch with no story underneath is just an expensive film nobody remembers.

Why everyone builds it backwards

So if story-first is so obviously better, why does almost nobody do it?

Because to build the story first, you need to actually know the people. And when you don't, the data is all you've got. So you lead with it, because it's the only thing on the table. You open with reach and demographics not because you decided story comes second, but because there was never a story there to begin with.

And to be clear, this isn't the usual "data bad" thing. The data belongs in the deck. It proves the opportunity and backs the story up. It just can't go first, because it can't do the one thing a story does, make someone care before they've seen a single number.

What the job actually is

Before you open the design tool, answer one question. What's the story here? Not the assets, not the reach, not the package. The one true thing this partnership is actually about. If you can't say it in a sentence or two, you're not ready to design anything yet.

Get that first, and everything after it gets easier and faster, because every decision finally has something to check itself against. Get it backwards, and no amount of polish will save it, because there's nothing underneath holding it up.

There's just one part nobody wants to hear. You can't shortcut the story with a tool. No report, no platform, no AI is going to hand it to you. You have to go and find it, in your own people.

That's the next one.