The directive was clear: You’ve got 5 minutes in the elevator. Show them who we are.

We were selected to participate in the P&G Elevator Pitch at Ad Age’s Small Agency Conference earlier this month. We asked ourselves, “how are we going to stand out?” Maybe we’ll rap the whole thing. Or we’ll show up in costume. Maybe we’ll dress as elevator repairmen. Or one of us will wear an eyepatch. We won’t mention the eyepatch, but they’ll have to remember the agency with the guy with an eyepatch, right?

If you’re not that into humiliating yourself, thinking about the pitch was terrible. It felt like certain doom.

Rehan our Executive Media Director and I flew to New Orleans, and we made our way to the makeshift elevator-to-nowhere in the conference lobby. Me without my socks and my shoes squishing from a perfectly timed thunderstorm. Rehan and I decided the pitch should be personal. We’ll make it conversational and interact with the P&G people in the elevator. We had rehearsed this. We stepped into the make-believe elevator, whose buttons were less useful than a hotel hairdryer on a pair of drenched socks. That’s when we discovered it was just me, Rehan, a countdown clock, and a camera. There would be no one else in the elevator. I had cold feet.

We used every one of our 300 seconds gabbing at that camera. When the time ticked down to zero and we blearily slid the door open, we felt P&G would see why an agency with so much nonprofit experience is the perfect partner to create meaningful advertising for its brands. You can read a short snippet from the pitch below to see our case. The question remains, will P&G call us back? Or was that little tin box as close as we’ll get?

– Daniel, ECD

Why should P&G work with an agency that specializes in nonprofit advertising? Because what we specialize in is trust. We have mastered getting people to buy something that they can’t actually hold in their hands. They buy a trust that the nonprofits we work for will do something great with their money.

And P&G’s products are all about trust. People trust you to put your products on their face before bed. They trust you to use your product to clean the dishes that they feed their families on. They trust you to wrap their babies in the diapers that you make. When we tell your story, people will believe it, and they’ll believe in you.

If you want to break out of the box, like you probably want to break out of this elevator, you don’t need to do something whacky or controversial. You need to do something meaningful.