Genre Analysis of an Elevator Pitch
The audience: Who is the speaker’s targeted audience in each case?
While all four pitches are geared towards behavioral persuasion and adjustment, they individually appeal to different motivations and distinct audiences. Julian Kemp’s movie pitch (which interestingly he doesn’t verbally give us the title of, just the broad plot outline and character motivation) taps into a deep sense of universality about love and hope, connecting the audience with the story and holding a mirror up to emotions we’ve all felt. His audience for the pitch is different from the one in the video. The pitch appeals to both potential viewers but also potentially to investors and those who might enable the film’s production, while the video the pitch exists inside of is oriented towards a more educational framework of how to create crisp, succinct and compelling pitches.
Lauren Berger’s pitch is in contrast, high energy, and packs a lot of content and training into a very compressed six minutes. She uses the framework of the elevator doors opening and closing to separate individual thoughts and approaches, primarily framed by what not to do as a means of getting at best practices. Her audience here has a more organizational and corporate focus, and is oriented towards those who find themselves with the opportunity of a short amount of time to make a big impression. It’s an audience which thrives on actionable steps, which fits neatly into her crafted running order of how best to fill the thirty seconds available. It’s also very apparent just how brief thirty seconds really is, and why saying more with less is a more effective and memorable approach.
The Virgin Pioneers pitch is more staged and structured, more polished in presentation but not as strong in substance as Lauren Berger’s. That said, it has some great insights, specifically around being able to confidently answer the question ‘what do you do’. It’s framed as 140 characters, but also focuses on the actionability of networking and being able to take advantage of serendipitous encounters. For me, this is the most common scenario where I work at NBC, where it is fairly common to ‘bump into’ executives in the hallways. The audience here isn’t those seeking to become ‘networking gods’ as the video suggests, but those looking to become more confident and crisp in articulating their value in unexpected situations (or even making those situations feel less unexpected the more you practice).
The Charity Water pitch is one free of knowing who is talking, and focuses on the charitable appeal of hardship. The audience target here is those who might choose to donate to Charity Water’s efforts, but by removing visualized personality, they enable their pitch to focus on the target of their work - those who need help. The appeal frames water as a normalized utility in the audience’s world, but a scarce resource for those they seek to help. In framing the opportunity to help make an abundant resource for those who would donate a scarce one for those who would benefit, they connect how the audience can make a difference.
The speaker's purpose/motivation: What does this speaker hope to accomplish with this pitch?
Julian Kemp: Invest in the movie, watch the movie, get confident with telling your own story
Lauren Berger: Structure your time, say more with less, focus on actionability and value, remember to close
Virgin Pioneers: Help others understand how you can solve a problem for them, get crisp and confident, don’t ramble
Charity Water: Monetary donations, emotional connection, empathetic action
The audience's motivation for listening to this pitch: Why would this person's audience take a minute to hear the individual's pitch? What is the possible benefit to the listener? What problem does the listener hope that the speaker might solve? Or what benefit or value does the listener hope the speaker might provide?
Julian Kemp: An example of a crisp, confident, enthusiastic but not overly-revealing storytelling, gives just enough away to leave the audience curious enough to take action
Lauren Berger: Very tactical, practical step-by-step tutorial for how to break down your thirty seconds into a structured beginning, middle and close, which focuses on what you can do for the other person, but also what you want to get from your pitch (money, time, opportunity etc.)
Virgin Pioneers: More an example of what not to do by demonstrating what vagueness looks and feels like, but encourages practice and preparedness to make serendipitous encounters more actionable and less uncomfortable
Charity Water: The clearest example of problem solving for very real-world scarcity. The motivation for listening to the pitch pulls at the moral motivation to help others less fortunate than ourselves, and how the smallest of donations can still make a big difference for those in need.
What is the structure of the pitch? What comes first, second, third, fourth? Are there differences in how each opens, what kinds of information the pitch provides, and how it closes?
Julian Kemp: Opens with a big existential question - is love a myth? Then it goes from big to small and focuses on an individual’s experience, then how the protagonist overcomes the challenges of that experience, then it closes by explaining why the audience must see the movie, and how it seeks to answer the opening big questions of the pitch. The pitch here goes from big to small, emphasizes curiosity about the world, and closes on why the movie might just make you think differently about those around you.
Lauren Berger: Opens with (controlled and deliberate) chaos and through a series of practical steps brings order to that chaos until it shapes the original raw material and enthusiasm into a clean, confident, actionable framework. The pitch goes from chaos to sharp, but is consistent in maintaining the original enthusiasm.
Virgin Pioneers: The pitch is strongly framed by the opportunity of the chance encounter, but closes in a similar way to Lauren Berger’s in motivating a very brief, structured and actionable takeaway.
Charity Water: This appeals to our existing knowledge and habits of abundance, contrasts them with the scarcity of resources elsewhere in the world, and closes with an ask framed by the moral duty to help those less fortunate than ourselves.
Are there features that appear in one example and not in the others?
Julian Kemp: Lots of authority here, even though it’s unclear who exactly Julian Kemp is (I assumed he was either the author or the director, turns out he’s actually both), but he brings a confident command of the material which feels genuine and truthful. We get the sense he has lived with this story for some time, and knows the most compelling reasons why we should go and see it. He’s isolated on a black background which allows us to focus on what he’s saying, and the video is split between what the pitch is, and how he thinks about the pitch itself.
Lauren Berger: Lots of activity here, from sliding elevator doors to whiteboards and written notes with graphics which keep everything moving along very quickly as Lauren imparts a lot of information in a short space of time.
Virgin Pioneers: This places the pitch in a real-world scenario of an encounter with an executive, framed by a before-and-after exercise which demonstrates how to go from vague to crisp.
Charity Water: Animated elements with a voiceover allow the pitch to tell the story of helping those far away from the target audience. The animated elements allow for smooth transitions between thoughts, but also are able to articulate the problem of scarcity and hardship in a compelling way.
The speaker's verbal style (word choice, sentence complexity and length, arrangement, pacing, tone). When you compare examples of the genre, is the style relatively consistent? If not, what do you make of the stylistic differences: do you think they are due to the audience the speaker is trying to reach, the context in which the pitch appears, the speaker’s discipline or purpose, the speaker’s desire to be stylistically distinctive?
Julian Kemp: Kemp’s pitch is practiced, measured, confident and eloquent. It’s the kind of tone which would command a formal authority to a boardroom of potential investors, but also would give enough information to a viewer to help them make a decision. It’s highly structured in answering a big existential question, but compelling enough that we are left curious enough to ask how the protagonist is actually going to solve all of these problems (trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhyym2SYO9I).
Lauren Berger: Lauren has a clear passion for the topic, and her energetic delivery demonstrates a clear desire to help her audience through practical, tactical means. Her verbal style is fast, but warm and approachable, and we get the sense she has lived all of the mistakes she wants us to learn from.
Virgin Pioneers: Very informal and casual, peppered with slang, and for me lacked some of the ‘executive presence’ needed to talk to senior folks within a company (for example I wouldn’t refer to someone as ‘Mr CEO’ or call them ‘buddy’, but this will obviously change context dependent upon the organization).
Charity Water: An emotional and morally-driven, measured delivery in its appeal to get its audience to donate. It is practical in its explanation of the problem, but also measured in its activation of the solution in donation.
The presentation: What is the speaker’s gestural style and general self-presentation? Does the speaker have any props or visual aids? Are these geared toward audience and purpose?
Julian Kemp: Very few gestures, Kemp sits comfortably and we get the sense he has done this same speech hundreds of times
Lauren Berger: Very animated, enthusiastic, even… caffeinated? It’s the kind of delivery that’s hard to absorb in one go, and I had to watch a couple of times to really hear everything she was saying, especially when she was using the whiteboard. Definitely a lot of fun, highly accessible, and she has a genuine confidence in her own delivery.
Virgin Pioneers: Very informal, and notably uses the (outdated?) prop of a business card
Charity Water: We don’t see the speaker here, but the audience is visually oriented towards the subject of the charitable donation, those who suffer from water scarcity.
The location/setting/timing of the speech: When and where is this pitch taking place? At a more granular level, what is the physical setting? What’s next to, behind, and in front of the speaker? Note, for example, that politicians are often careful to feature flags or other symbols of patriotism in their backgrounds or to their sides. Is the speech taking place in a large hall, a restaurant, the street, an academic seminar room? Is the speaker sitting down with the audience, lecturing from a podium?
Julian Kemp: This has an ‘anywhereness’ or an ‘anytimeness’ to it in its physical non-situation, which allows a focus on the speaker and frees the pitch of any external distractions
Lauren Berger: Lauren greenscreens herself into an elevator environment, but also uses the prop of a whiteboard to do what she wants the video to achieve - to educate her audience through the value of her tuition and passionate delivery.
Virgin Pioneers: This takes place in what feels like an actual elevator, but is likely still a staged environment, complete with an extra who delivers (I think) a punchline I couldn’t understand.
Charity Water: This takes place in a virtual, animated, stylized representation of the home of the target audience and in the environment of the charitable aid, bridging the gap between abundance and scarcity of natural resources.
