23-05-2025
You Want Bold Work? Rethink Your Creative Review Process
Flavio Vidigal is Partner and Chief Creative Officer at Rise New York & Partners.
Most creative reviews are still stuck in performance mode: An agency performs, the client reacts and everyone nods.
As a creative who's sat on both sides of that table—pitching, judging and nodding politely—I've experienced the flaws of this process firsthand. We say we want brave work, but then we build review systems that quietly kill it. Work gets evaluated like a school project: It's passable, polished and safe.
But what if we've been reviewing the wrong thing all along?
I've advocated for this shift for years, and Graziela Di Giorgi, founder of the Human/Rise consultancy, has been pioneering it for over a decade. Di Giorgi is the creator of the 'Human Pitch' method—a philosophy and practice she's developed over years of helping brands and agencies connect beyond decks and deliverables.
Instead of boardroom performances and choreographed calls, Di Giorgi proposes something more straightforward and far more honest: What if creative reviews worked more like chemistry sessions—not evaluations but auditions for long-term creative partnerships?
In this context, a chemistry session isn't a polite meet-and-greet. It's a live, unscripted creative exchange. You're not presenting slides—you're revealing how you think, work and show up under pressure. You're not pitching polish. You're showing conviction.
I've seen this approach work. We've used it at my agency to forge some of our strongest client relationships—not by wowing them with polish, but by letting them feel who we really are and how we think. That's what the Human Pitch approach is all about.
It's not about showmanship. It's about chemistry, clarity and creative guts. It's about choosing the person behind the idea, not just the idea itself. Because the best campaigns don't come from clean decks—they come from people who give a damn.
If you're a modern chief marketing officer, you're not just buying execution. You're probably looking for creative partners who move with urgency and speak with soul—the kind who can take your brand somewhere it's never been, but always belonged.
That kind of work doesn't survive a review process built to avoid friction. It needs friction. It needs belief. It needs space for something unpolished but undeniably true.
The Human Pitch mindset gives you what traditional reviews can't: a read on voice, a sense of instinct and a glimpse into the people who will build the thing together, not just sell it.
Here's how to bring this mindset into your next review:
• Ask for the talent, not just the pitch team. You're hiring minds, not decks.
• Look for truth, not safety. Are they showing what's expected—or what's unignorable?
• Read the energy. Who's in it for real? Who's still got fire in their voice?
• Pick the voice, not just the execution. Slides can be rewritten. The right creative voice? That's rare.
As Dan Wieden used to say, "Walk in stupid," meaning be curious, open, humble and willing to be surprised. We use this phrase at the agency to remind ourselves and our clients to leave the ego at the door and make room for something better than what we expected.
Remember, you're not just choosing a campaign. You're casting the voice of your brand's future. So drop the performance act. Make space for conviction, for tension, for the kind of creative friction that changes things. Walk into the room ready to be moved, not managed, because safe work doesn't get remembered. And if no one feels it, it never happened.
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