What a Campaign-grade pitch actually looks like

The phrase "Campaign-grade" gets used a lot. It usually means "high effort." That's not wrong, but it's not specific enough to copy.

A pitch that gets opened, replied to and run in Campaign - or Shots, or Creative Boom, or The Drum - usually has the same six elements arranged in the same order. The headline matters more than people think. The opening line matters more than the headline.

I'll walk through the structure that works. Then I'll walk through the one that doesn't, so you can spot it in your own draft.

The structure that works

Subject line. Verb-led, eight words or fewer, no agency name in the first four words. The subject line's job is to earn the open. The body's job is to earn the reply.

Compare:

• "Agency X launches new platform for Brand Y" - about you.
• "How a £40k brief reached 2.3m people" - about the reader's problem.

The second one gets opened. Even before you read the pitch, you can guess what's coming next.

Opening sentence. State the news in a way that already contains the news peg. "Three weeks after the FCA's new finance ad rules came in, [Brand] launched the first work in market that responds to them." Now the editor knows what story they'd be reporting. They don't need to invent the angle.

Second sentence: the proof. One concrete result, one specific number, one named person, or one piece of cultural evidence (a tweet, a meme, a screenshot). Whatever survives the lawyer.

The 'why this, why now' paragraph. Three to five sentences explaining what's interesting about the work in the context of the publication's beat. This is where most pitches lose - they explain why the work is interesting to the agency, not why it's interesting to the publication's readers.

The quote. From a named human, written like they speak. Run it past them. If they hate it, you've written it wrong.

The offer. What you can give the editor that nobody else can: an interview window, an exclusive case study, the campaign film 48 hours before launch, the strategy doc, the planning workings. Make the offer specific. "Available for interview" is not an offer. "Strategy director free this Wednesday and Thursday morning" is.

That's the whole structure. Six elements, in that order, in fewer than 300 words.

What "high effort" really means

The pitches that work look like five-minute reads. They take a long time to write.

The work is mostly in cuts. A first draft is always too long, too vague, too internal. Each pass removes one sentence about the agency and adds one fact the editor will use in their write-up. By the fourth pass, the pitch has done the editor's structuring work for them.

That's the move. The editor's instinct after reading a Campaign-grade pitch isn't "this looks interesting, let me dig in". It's "the piece almost writes itself". That's what you're aiming for.

The structure that doesn't work

Compare the above with what most agency pitches actually do:

• Subject line names the agency
• First sentence is the announcement
• Second sentence is the agency boilerplate
• Quote is from the CEO saying the work "represents a bold new chapter"
• The peg is missing
• The offer is "interview opportunities available"

Every editor reading that knows in the first three seconds that the pitch is a press release wearing a story costume. The reply rate is roughly zero.

How long this takes

A pitch to the trade press should take about ninety minutes to write properly. The first thirty are research - what the publication has covered this month, what's missing, who the editor is, what beat they cover. The next thirty are the first draft. The last thirty are cuts.

That's about three pitches per working day if you're concentrating. Most agencies write thirty in a morning and wonder why nothing lands.

The maths is the answer.

A test for your next pitch

Before you send anything, run this:

1. Read the subject line. Does it contain a verb? Does it imply a question the reader would answer to find out?
2. Read the first sentence. Could a freelance journalist quote it in their write-up without rewriting it?
3. Read the quote. Does it use a contraction? Does it sound like the person you've quoted ever actually says these words?
4. Read the offer. Is it a specific thing only you can give?
5. Cut three sentences. Now read it again.

If steps 4 and 5 made the pitch better, it wasn't ready before. Most aren't.