Going up?

What good is an elevator pitch if it’s not done on an actual elevator?

Anyone can sell a halfway decent idea under the burning fluorescence of a soulless conference room, set apart by glass doors and cork walls. This is a far cry from making the speech of your life in between floors as the hanging pulley box inches closer to the finish line. There’s no extra time in this scenario, only certain humiliation when those two doors separate to reveal a bank packed with office malcontents. Anything that rises above small talk on an elevator is difficult. Weather, sports and the quality of the elevator itself are the three subjects everyone can generally get behind. But that's it. 

Presentation decks are training wheels for advertising creatives – safely keeping us upright amid the glare of steely client faces. We’ve lost our way, folks. If you’re not testing out pitches on escalators and moving sidewalks, they’re not going to be ready for showtime. Without elevators, there would be no surefire way of distinguishing good ideas from bad ones. How else to explain the glut of terrible ideas in the years preceding the birth of the elevator? You’d never use leeches on someone’s swollen forearm as a viable medical procedure in a world where people fly between floors in seconds. That’s a staircase idea, plain and simple. One that’s great on paper, but not on epidermis. 

It should be no surprise that the elevator, patented in 1887, existed well before the birth of Hollywood. That budding screenwriters relying on their wits and obsequiousness, sold screenplays only after the elevator is all the evidence I need to defend its place in the history of art. 

What was the world before elevators? Not one where the penthouse suite was anything to covet. The process of sifting through ideas involved a tremendous amount of trial and error. It was practically archeological in its randomness. Finding a dinosaur bone requires no skill, all luck and a preternatural affinity for disappointment. The sort of places visionaries went to sell their concepts were far more dangerous than the controlled environment of an elevator. People flocked to the top of moving train cars, rarely finding their footing before either they or their target tumbled off the car into the tall mangroves lining the tracks. 

But elevators, while scary to the uninitiated, are relatively safe when compared to window ledges and high-wires. It helps that you can’t take them in an emergency. I mean, you could take them in an emergency, but should you live, you’d see a side of your building’s typically warm Fire Marshal that’s usually reserved for arsonists and pyromaniacs. 

Elevators are also cozy, limited in size – a VIP room for the presentation. Unless your idea demands a freight load, there are no superfluous people inside to judge or dismiss. Many important pitches see every seat filled despite the fact that one or two people are making the decision. There’s some woman you’ve never met sitting to your left. A guy with thick glasses and a thicker laptop to your right. And someone referred to as “The Good Doctor” right across the table, who says nary a word the entire time. He gesticulates, he sighs, he rolls his eyes. His job is to break you down. But none of these people could fit in an elevator. 

We live in a world that’s much too figurative, too opaque and difficult to decipher. When the literal is what truly matters in the end. We ought to look up when someone asks, “what’s up?” We should eat horse if we’re that hungry. And we should make elevator pitches on elevators.