Yet look around and you’ll find committees are everywhere in marketing. They add until campaigns creak and crumble; the crowd packs and stacks and relents only when too tired to go on.
Why do we suffer this input? It seems most people think that more input will make a thing better. But it doesn’t. Not unless everyone is adequately skilled in the now vanishing art of getting inside the reader’s mind. Without that rubric, reviewers just gratify their own personal tastes. In which case, you get a lot of people adding rocks.
For example, an executive who asked me to avoid purple because they read a thing once. Or a CTO who was so accustomed to passive voice, they demanded it exclusively. This adds rounds and hours, but in the end, does it actually improve the product? Over ten years of this I can say, it often does not. Much of this input has no bearing on the reader’s perception and is wasteful because someone must incorporate it against their good taste, and it grinds down that creative’s ego.
Many B2B creative reviews are like executive chefs arguing over the meat only for the customer to be appalled by their choice of bacon-wrapped duck—because they are vegetarian.
Thus, we limit our review groups to 1-3 people. Some organizations gasp and object. So we clothe this requirement in the blazing authority of a chef’s toque: A principle. We call it No Creative By Committee. It demands that we:
- Give singular creative control to one person.
- Limit reviews to 1-3 credible individuals.
- Accept broader input, but the singular creative decides.
The “credible” part is key. Everyone has opinions. But are those people aware enough to know if their input is a useful contribution? Credible people do. They are mentalizing the reader. They know how to both add and subtract, and recuse themselves if they can't be helpful.
The truth is, if everyone on the team is credible, you can involve more than 1-3 people. But the not-so-credible tend to not know they aren't credible. They share every idea that arises and bemoan the color purple. They hold their ideas precious and overfill the pot. Thus the rule is a helpful guardrail.
I’m pleased to say that this year all of our clients are the credible sort. It’s been a lot of work to find those people and to be the studio they want to work with. Now, when one that is less practiced at reviewing slips in, it’s painfully obvious and reviews are ten times more work for no improvement.
Because, we want quality, not consensus. I don’t care if the committee likes it. I don't even care if I like it. I care if it works. The soup is for the reader. On my watch, none will break their teeth on rocks.
