Most approach sections describe a process. "We'll start with a discovery call, then develop a treatment, then shoot over two days, then deliver a first cut within a week."
That's a schedule. Every serious applicant has one, they're all roughly identical, and it tells the brand nothing about whether you understood their problem.
The approach is the one part of a pitch that can't be copied from your last one. It's where the decision usually gets made.
Lead by restating their problem
Open by saying what you think the actual problem is, in your own words.
Not a summary of their brief — a restatement that shows you've thought past it. Briefs are written by people who are close to the problem and often describe the symptom rather than the cause.
The second one has already earned the meeting. It also risks being wrong — and that's fine, because being wrong in an interesting way starts a conversation, while being safe and generic doesn't start anything.
Commit to one direction
The most common weakness in pitches is offering three options.
It feels accommodating. It reads as an unwillingness to decide, and it pushes the creative judgement back onto the client — who is hiring you partly so they don't have to make it.
Pick one. Explain why. Mention what you considered and rejected, in a sentence, because that shows the alternatives were weighed rather than never occurring to you.
"I considered doing this as a customer testimonial and decided against it, because the strongest thing you have is the process itself and a testimonial would hide it." That one sentence does more work than three mood-boarded options.
Show the mechanism
Get concrete about how the piece works. Not the schedule — the structure.
- What's on screen in the first five seconds, and why that stops someone
- The shape of the middle: what happens in what order
- What the viewer feels or understands at the end, and what they do next
If there's a single idea holding the piece together, name it. A brand can approve an idea. They can't approve a vibe, and they'll ask for revisions until the vibe resolves into something they can.
Name the risk
The move almost nobody makes, and it's the most credible thing in a pitch.
Every approach has a weak point. Say what yours is and how you'd handle it.
- "The risk with this is that it depends on your CEO being relaxed on camera. I'd shoot a fallback interview setup the same morning so we're not stuck if it isn't working."
- "The risk is that the location is noisy. I'd budget for lavs and a backup indoor setup."
Naming a risk reads as experience. Everyone who's shot more than a handful of things knows the plan meets reality; a pitch with no acknowledged risk reads either as inexperienced or as marketing. And it makes the good outcome more credible, because you've shown you're planning for the bad one.
What the brand needs from you
Include a short section on what you'd need — access, people, decisions, turnaround on notes.
Two reasons. It's genuinely useful, because it's the beginning of the hand-off and it flushes out problems early. And it signals that you've done this before and know where projects go wrong.
Be specific about review turnaround in particular. "Notes on the first cut within three working days" sets a norm before it becomes a problem, and a brand that can't commit to it is telling you something now rather than in week six.
Where gear goes
Near the bottom, briefly, and only where it matters.
Kit belongs in a pitch when it's load-bearing: a gimbal because the piece is built on movement, a specific lens because you want a particular falloff, two cameras because you can't ask a customer to repeat themselves.
A camera body name on its own communicates nothing to a marketer. Worse, leading with equipment signals that you think of yourself as an operator rather than someone who solves a problem — and that's a pricing position as much as a positioning one.
Length and structure
One page. Two at absolute most.
A workable shape:
- The problem, restated — two or three sentences
- The approach — one committed direction, with reasoning
- How it works — the structure, concretely
- The risk — one paragraph
- What I'd need from you — a short list
- Relevant work — two or three pieces, each with a line on why it's relevant, not just a link
That last point matters. Sending five unlabelled links makes the brand do the work of finding the relevance. Two links with "this one because the client's CEO had never been on camera either" is far stronger — see what brands look for in a reel.
Two things to cut
Your company boilerplate. Nobody reads it. If your positioning is doing work, it should be visible in how you think about their problem.
Anything hedged into meaninglessness. "We'd explore a range of stylistic directions to find the right tone." This says nothing and reads as either evasive or unprepared.
When you disagree with the brief
Say so, carefully, and give them the version they asked for as well.
The pattern that works: "Here's what I'd make, and here's why. If you'd rather stay with the original brief, here's how I'd approach that instead — it's a good option too, and the difference is X."
You've shown your thinking, taken a position, and given them a way to say no without saying no to you. That's the whole diplomatic problem solved in three sentences.
Where Acumin fits
Pitch Studio builds block-based pitch documents from your real profile, so relevant work and credentials are pulled in rather than reassembled per pitch — which leaves your effort where it belongs, on the approach itself.
You can see how far a brand actually read, which is genuinely useful feedback: a pitch that stops being read at the schedule section is telling you something about the order of your document.
With Creator Pro there's an AI drafting partner that works from the brief, and the honest framing matters — it drafts and tightens; it doesn't have the insight about the client's actual problem. That's the part that wins the job, and it has to come from you.
How to use this today
Take your last pitch. Cover everything except the approach section and read it.
Ask whether it could have been sent to a different brand with three words changed. If it could, that's why you didn't hear back — and rewriting the opening paragraph is an hour's work.
Related: How to pitch a brand: the treatment that wins is the whole document this section sits inside. What brands actually look for in a reel is how to choose the work you attach.