por Ber | Mar 30, 2026 | Uncategorized
The communications committee was formed with good intentions. Most organizational tragedies begin this way. Someone senior noticed that the company’s communications were inconsistent, or that the wrong people were approving things, or that a tweet had gone out without the right sign-off and there had been a mild incident. The solution was a committee. The committee would bring structure. The committee would bring alignment. The committee would ensure that nothing went out without everyone being on the same page.
The committee has been meeting for eleven months. The company’s social media account last posted six weeks ago. The newsletter is eight months overdue. The press release about the product launch is in its fourth revision, incorporating feedback from six different stakeholders who have never been in the same room and who each have different ideas about what the company stands for. The committee is very well-structured.
The Anatomy of a Communications Committee
The typical communications committee includes: the Head of Marketing, who actually understands communications and is slowly dying inside; the CEO or a direct representative of the CEO, whose presence means nothing can be decided without implicit reference to what the CEO might think; the Head of Legal, who reviews everything for liability and has a broad definition of liability; the Head of HR, who is there to ensure all communications are “inclusive” and “respectful,” which means she flags anything with an edge; the Sales Director, who wants everything to include a call to action and doesn’t understand why brand communications sometimes don’t; and two or three additional stakeholders whose inclusion was a political decision and who attend inconsistently.
This group meets monthly. Monthly is not frequent enough to move at the speed of communications in any industry that has existed since 2008, but it is frequent enough to make everyone feel like the process is under control. Between meetings, feedback is collected asynchronously, which means the Head of Marketing sends a document into a void and receives comments from different people at different times, occasionally contradicting each other, with no way to adjudicate without a meeting.
The next meeting is in three weeks.
What Gets Made (And What Doesn’t)
The committee produces a specific kind of communication: one that satisfies all objections. Not one that says something true, or distinctive, or useful — one that has survived the objections of eight people with different priorities and different risk tolerances. The result is communication that is technically correct, legally reviewed, HR-approved, Sales-endorsed, and completely inert. It says things that are true in a way that would not move any reasonable person to feel or do anything specific.
Everything that doesn’t get made is more interesting. The campaign that the Head of Marketing thought would genuinely cut through — too risky. The founder’s story piece that could have built real brand equity — the CEO’s representative felt it was “too personal.” The reactive social content that would have shown the brand had a point of view — by the time it was approved, the moment had passed. The committee is a very effective filter for anything that could go wrong. It is equally effective at filtering out anything that could work.
The Slower Disaster
The communications committee doesn’t create dramatic crises. It creates a slower, quieter disaster: the gradual erosion of a brand’s presence and distinctiveness through the accumulation of small omissions. Nothing goes catastrophically wrong. Nothing goes notably right either. The brand continues to exist in a kind of communications limbo, technically present across channels, practically invisible in any meaningful sense.
This is particularly lethal in categories where brand personality drives preference — which is to say, most consumer categories and a surprising number of B2B ones. Buyers don’t choose purely on rational criteria. They choose brands they feel something about. A brand that says nothing, or that says everything in a voice scrubbed clean of any editorial risk, gives buyers nothing to feel. It competes purely on price and availability, which is a fine position if you’re the cheapest option and a deeply uncomfortable one if you’re not.
The irony is that the committee was formed to protect the brand, and the committee’s method of protection — eliminate risk, ensure approval, slow everything down — gradually does what no single communications error could: it makes the brand irrelevant.
What Actually Works
Brands that communicate effectively have, almost without exception, a small number of people with clear decision-making authority and strong points of view. They have an editorial lead who can move quickly, guided by clear brand principles rather than committee approval. They have escalation paths for genuinely high-stakes communications, and they don’t mistake “high-stakes” for “anything that has a comma in it.”
The committee, if it must exist, works best as a governing body for strategy and principles, not as an approval process for individual pieces of content. Approve the voice, the themes, the guardrails — then let the people with expertise operate within them. Trust your communications professionals to communicate. This is what you hired them for.
If you’re the person sitting in that committee meeting, watching a perfectly good campaign idea get revised into meaninglessness, the Fuck The Brief collection was made for the specific expression on your face right now. And when you’re ready to build something that actually moves people, No Briefs Club is here — no committee required.
por Ber | Mar 30, 2026 | Uncategorized
Somewhere in a creative review room, a marketing team is looking at a campaign concept featuring a family gathered around a kitchen table, warm light pouring through a window, a golden retriever nearby, and a voiceover about being there when it matters most. The creative team has crafted this concept thoughtfully, drawing on genuine consumer research, crafting a narrative about protection and peace of mind. The legal team has approved it. The CEO thinks it captures the brand essence.
Twenty-three other insurance companies ran essentially the same campaign this quarter.
This is not coincidence. It is not laziness. It is not even a failure of creative ambition, though it looks like all three from the outside. Insurance advertising sameness is the logical output of a specific set of industry conditions acting on rational people making rational decisions. Understanding why all insurance ads look the same is understanding something true about how categories constrain creativity — and how creativity finds its exits anyway, when it bothers to look.
The Category Trap
Insurance sells an invisible product. Unlike a car, which you can show in motion on a coastal highway, or a phone, which you can film being used in gorgeous light, insurance is the absence of catastrophe. It’s the thing that exists so that the worst thing that could happen doesn’t ruin everything. You can’t photograph protection. You can’t film security. What you can film is the thing that protection makes possible: the family, the home, the future, the ordinary Tuesday that continues undisrupted because someone was thoughtful enough to have a policy.
This constraint — show what the product enables, not the product itself — immediately narrows the visual territory. Insurance enables continuity. Continuity looks like family. Family looks like kitchens and living rooms and backyards and children running toward parents. The golden light is emotional shorthand for “things are good right now and we’d like them to stay that way.” The dog is there because dogs test well with consumers and are universally legible as “comfortable domestic life.”
Advertising, you can argue, is the dog.
Risk Aversion in the Risk-Aversion Business
Insurance companies are structurally risk-averse. This is the point of them. And this structural conservatism extends, with remarkable consistency, into their marketing departments. The brief that says “break category convention” still gets reviewed by the same stakeholders who approved the last three conventionally-produced campaigns. The brand safety concerns are real: an insurance company that runs an edgy, funny, or emotionally complex campaign risks communicating that they are not serious, which is exactly the wrong signal for a company whose entire value proposition is “trust us with your worst moments.”
The few insurance brands that have broken convention — GEICO with its parade of absurdist characters, Progressive with Flo’s cheerful uncanniness, Lemonade with its design-first digital irreverence — tend to be companies that identified a specific positioning advantage in being different. GEICO decided price and ease were the story; absurdist humor communicates “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” and by extension “we’re not like those stiff old insurance companies.” The humor is strategic, not random.
But here’s the thing: GEICO’s success inspired a wave of insurance companies trying to do “the funny one,” which recreated the sameness at a different register. Now there are multiple insurance brands running quirky campaigns that are trying to be the GEICO of their sub-category. The category trap moves, but it doesn’t disappear.
What the Sameness Actually Communicates
This is the most uncomfortable part of the analysis: the sameness might be working. Not working in the sense that it’s building distinctive brands or generating cultural impact or earning creative awards, but working in the sense that it communicates “we are a trustworthy, established, normal insurance company” — which is what a significant portion of insurance buyers need to feel before purchasing. The warm family is not there to inspire. It’s there to reassure.
Effectiveness research in financial services and insurance consistently shows that category conventions build category trust. Consumers recognize the visual language of “real insurance company” and it lowers their purchase anxiety. A genuinely distinctive insurance campaign risks being filtered out as “weird” or misread as “probably a startup that will disappear.” Category sameness is, in certain segments, a feature.
This doesn’t make the creative work interesting. It makes it strategic in a way that’s hard to argue with from inside a client meeting. When the brief says “we need to be trusted by conservative buyers in the 45-65 demographic,” the golden retriever and the kitchen light are a reasonable creative solution, even if they’re also the same creative solution your competitor ran last month.
The Exit, For Those Who Are Looking
The genuinely exciting creative work in insurance happens at the edges: in digital product experiences, in content that educates rather than reassures, in campaigns that target underserved segments who are specifically not being served by the mainstream visual language. It happens when someone with creative courage makes the case that their brand has a specific permission to be different because they’ve earned a different kind of trust.
It also happens, occasionally, when someone in a creative meeting looks at the brief and says the thing that everyone is thinking: “This is exactly what our top three competitors did last year. Is that what we want?” Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes that question opens a door.
The Fuck The Brief notebook is for writing the campaign you’d pitch if you had the permission. Maybe one day you’ll get it. In the meantime, visit No Briefs Club for creative that didn’t ask permission and got away with it.
por Ber | Mar 30, 2026 | Uncategorized
At some point in the last decade, naming became an industry. Not a byproduct of branding work, not a creative deliverable that emerged naturally from brand strategy, but an industry. There are nomenclature consultants. There are naming agencies. There are platforms that generate brand name candidates using AI and then charge you for the trademark clearance on the ones the algorithm likes. The process has been systematized, stratified, and — in proportion to the name that typically emerges at the end of it — made extremely expensive.
The name, when it arrives, is usually some variation of what you already had. This is not always bad. Sometimes the old name was actually fine and the organization just needed to feel like they’d given the question serious consideration. Sometimes the process genuinely produces something better. But the ratio of investment to naming improvement is one of the most reliable dark comedies in the marketing industry.
The Architecture of a Naming Process
A proper corporate naming engagement begins with research. Stakeholder interviews that establish what the brand means to different parts of the organization — which is to say, they establish that different parts of the organization have completely different ideas about what the brand means, a revelation that costs roughly $40,000 to document. Then there is competitive analysis: a thorough look at what names exist in the category, which always confirms that the category is full of names that are variations of three archetypes (abstract coined words, founder surnames, and slightly misspelled common nouns).
Then there is naming territory mapping. The naming agency presents a strategic framework that organizes potential approaches into territories like “Aspirational,” “Functional,” “Human,” and “Invented,” with descriptions of what each territory suggests about the brand positioning. The client nods. They like two territories in particular. They want to “explore both directions.”
Then there are naming candidates. Hundreds of them, presented in batches, with short rationales for each. The client reviews them. Legal reviews them. Half are eliminated because they’re already trademarked in the relevant markets. A third of the remainder are eliminated because someone in the room has a personal association with the word. The remaining options go back to the agency for “refinement.”
Why It Takes Six Months
Naming takes six months because everyone has an opinion and nobody has authority. The CEO likes abstract coined words. The Head of Sales wants something that clearly communicates what the company does, because she’s been in enough prospect calls to know that abstract coined words generate the question “what do you do?” seventeen times per conference. Legal wants something defensible. Marketing wants something distinctive. The founder still has feelings about the original name they chose in 2011 and isn’t fully conscious of how those feelings are influencing their feedback.
These constituencies rarely meet simultaneously to resolve their differences. Instead, their feedback arrives in sequence, filtered through whoever organized the meeting, sometimes contradicting the previous round’s direction, sometimes contradicting each other within the same round. The naming agency, to its credit, typically continues to provide options with equanimity, because they have been through this before and they know that the process will eventually converge on something, possibly because the client runs out of time or budget or opinions.
The Name That Emerges
The final name is almost always one of the following: a portmanteau of two relevant concepts (Connectify, Innovabridge, Growthly), a common word with unusual spelling that felt clever in 2018 and now simply has an incorrect vowel (Xelerate, Vyve, Kleer), a single word that was available as a domain name because it is obscure enough that nobody had claimed it (Luma, Arca, Kova), or — in the case of a rebrand — a name that is approximately 15% different from the original name, changed enough to signal intentionality but similar enough that the existing customer base experiences no meaningful disruption.
None of these are wrong. Some of them are genuinely good. The issue is that six months and significant investment in the process does not reliably produce better names than three weeks of focused creative work with a competent strategist and a copywriter with good linguistic instincts. The correlation between process rigor and name quality is, at best, weak.
What Actually Makes a Good Name
A good name is distinctive in its category, pronounceable by its intended audience, available as a trademark, not offensive in the primary markets where the brand will operate, and somehow suggestive of what makes the brand interesting or different. That’s the whole list. Everything else is taste, and taste varies.
Good names tend to come from people with strong opinions making quick decisions with genuine creative conviction — which is exactly the opposite of the six-month multi-stakeholder nomenclature process. This is not an argument against process. It’s an argument for knowing what process is designed to produce. The naming process is often better understood as an alignment mechanism than a creative mechanism: its real function is to give everyone a voice and bring the organization to a shared decision, not to produce the best possible name.
When that’s acknowledged up front, the process becomes more honest and often faster. When it isn’t, you get six months of workshops and a name that’s one letter away from what you started with.
Track the whole ordeal with a KPI Shark notebook — ideal for documenting the moments where everyone agreed the name was perfect and then came back the next day with concerns. And when it’s over, whatever the name is, build the brand well. At No Briefs Club, we’re proof that what you call something matters less than what you do with the name you’ve got.
por Ber | Mar 30, 2026 | Uncategorized
The voice arrives at inconvenient moments. Right before you send the pitch. Right after you sign the contract. In the middle of a presentation that is going well, which somehow makes it worse. The voice has one message and it delivers it with remarkable consistency: you are not as good as they think you are. At some point, probably soon, everyone is going to figure this out. You have been performing competence. The performance is about to end.
This is impostor syndrome, and it affects an estimated 70% of people at some point in their careers — a statistic that should be more comforting than it is, because knowing you’re in good company does not silence the voice, it just changes the acoustics slightly.
Why Creatives Get It Worse
Impostor syndrome affects people across industries, but creatives get a particular, enhanced version because the work is subjective. An engineer can point to a bridge that doesn’t fall down and say: this is evidence of my competence. A surgeon can cite outcomes. A creative cannot point to a headline and prove it was objectively excellent. They can show it won an award, which helps, but then someone will note that awards are judged by other creatives who also feel like impostors, and the whole thing collapses.
The creative is also constantly working at the intersection of their own taste and someone else’s brief, which means the work is never fully theirs to be proud of. If it’s good, it was a good collaboration. If it’s bad, they wonder if they could have pushed harder. There is no clean baseline of “I did this and I know it was right.” There is only “I think this works, based on a set of principles I believe in, for a brief I partially understood, for a client whose market I partially know, judged by a process I don’t fully control.”
That’s a lot of partially. The voice loves partial.
The Taxonomy of Creative Impostor Thoughts
They come in recognizable patterns. There’s the “I just got lucky” thought, which attributes all positive outcomes to circumstances and all negative outcomes to fundamental character flaws. There’s the “they’ll figure it out” thought, which assumes any current confidence clients or colleagues have in you is based on incomplete information that will eventually be corrected. There’s the “I’ve peaked” thought, which arrives specifically when things are going well, because if things are going well then there’s nowhere to go but the inevitable decline.
And then there’s the most creative-specific variant: the “my taste is mediocre and I don’t know it.” This one is subtle and particularly vicious. It doesn’t say you’re incompetent at execution. It says your judgment is miscalibrated. That the things you believe are good are actually fine at best. That you lack the perspective to know what you’re missing because what you’re missing is perspective.
This thought is occasionally useful. Mostly it’s not. The difference matters.
What the Research Actually Says
The psychological literature on impostor syndrome — first described by Dr. Pauline Clance and Dr. Suzanne Imes in 1978 — is clear on a few things. It is not a personality disorder. It is not correlated with actual competence; it often inversely correlates with it, because the people most likely to recognize complexity and nuance are the ones most aware of how much they don’t know. It tends to peak during transitions: new roles, new clients, new creative territories. And it tends to decrease with experience, not because you get better (though you do), but because you accumulate evidence that contradicts the voice.
The evidence is useful. You didn’t fail the last ten clients. The work has been received. You have navigated situations that felt impossible when they started. The voice doesn’t update on this evidence easily — it’s more like a paranoid colleague who treats every success as a lucky exception — but you can train yourself to cite the evidence deliberately, especially during the moments the voice gets loudest.
Making the Voice Useful
The goal is not to silence impostor syndrome. People who completely silence their self-doubt often become the most dangerous people in any creative organization: the ones who send work with absolute confidence that it’s correct, who never question their assumptions, who mistake certainty for quality. A small, functional amount of self-doubt is a quality control mechanism.
The goal is to right-size it. To let the voice ask the useful questions — is this actually as good as it could be? am I missing something? — and then to stop it before it gets to the existential claims. The voice can be a junior editor. It cannot be the creative director.
It helps to say the thought out loud, which is embarrassing and also extremely effective. “I’m worried this work isn’t good enough” sounds very different when spoken to another creative than when it echoes in your skull at 2am. The other creative, invariably, says “I felt that about the last thing I shipped.” The voice loses power in contact with reality.
The Fuck The Brief collection was built partly for this — for the creative who doubts themselves in the middle of the work and needs a reminder that the doubt is data, not verdict. Bad work doesn’t usually come with this much anxiety. It comes with confidence, from the people who stopped listening to the voice entirely.
You’re probably doing better than you think. The voice is evidence of standards. The work exists. Send the pitch. No Briefs Club is full of people who feel exactly the same and showed up anyway.
por Ber | Mar 30, 2026 | Uncategorized
He emerges late in the project. He was never mentioned in the brief, or the kickoff, or any of the three rounds of revisions you thought brought you to approval. He appears suddenly in a Tuesday morning email with the subject line “small thought from my nephew who does a bit of this” — and from that moment forward, nothing is the same.
The nephew knows about design. Or more precisely, the nephew has used Canva, has opinions about fonts, once helped a friend with a logo for a food truck, and has watched enough YouTube to feel confident in a visual critique. He is eighteen. He works in construction. He does not have a client relationship with you or a budget or a stake in the outcome. None of this matters. He is the nephew, and his feedback has entered the process.
The Taxonomy of the Design-Adjacent Relative
The nephew is the most common variant, but the category is broader. There is the daughter who studies graphic design in her first year of university and has Opinions about color palettes. The husband who worked in advertising in the nineties and therefore believes he understands the current landscape. The business partner who once hired a freelancer for a personal project and now considers themselves a procurement expert. The friend who just redesigned their blog.
What unites all of them is the same dynamic: they are not the client, they did not commission the work, and they have been given informal veto power by someone who does not fully understand that this is what they’re doing. The client isn’t malicious. They showed the nephew because they were excited, or uncertain, or because the nephew is around and has an opinion on everything. And then the nephew had an opinion on this, and now here you are.
The feedback, filtered through the client, arrives in one of two forms. The gentle form: “My nephew had a thought, take it or leave it, just wondered what you think.” The catastrophic form: “I showed it to some people and they felt the logo could be more dynamic. Can we try something bolder? Maybe something with more energy? They also thought the blue was a bit flat.”
Why This Feedback Is Uniquely Dangerous
All creative feedback has to be interpreted. The client says “make it pop,” and you translate that into something actionable. The client says “I don’t love it,” and you ask questions until you understand what “love” looks like in visual form. This is normal. This is the job.
The nephew’s feedback is dangerous because it has already been translated once, by someone who also isn’t a designer, and what arrives to you is a twice-removed approximation of an instinctive reaction from a person with no professional context for their instincts. “More dynamic” might mean “I found it boring” or “I liked the previous version better” or “I found the background color slightly overwhelming on my phone screen” — and you have no way to ask the nephew which of these he meant, because the nephew is not your client and is probably installing drywall right now.
You act on it anyway, because the client is excited about the nephew’s input, or slightly insecure about their own taste, or just wants to see what “dynamic” looks like before they decide. You come back with three new directions. One of them the client likes. The nephew would have preferred the original, apparently. The project has now added a week and one invoice dispute.
How to Handle the Nephew Without Losing the Client
The first line of defense is the brief. A proper brief — one that establishes stakeholder sign-off, defines who has decision-making authority, and clarifies the review process — makes it harder for the nephew to enter the process formally. It doesn’t stop the client from showing the work to family; nothing stops that. But it gives you a frame to reference when the feedback arrives. “As we agreed, decisions on visual direction are being made by you and your marketing manager. Happy to schedule a call to discuss any concerns before we act on them.”
The second line of defense is curiosity, not defensiveness. “Tell me more about what your nephew noticed — what specific element was he reacting to?” This slows the feedback down. It forces translation back through the client. It often reveals that the nephew’s concern was minor and specific, not the brand overhaul it sounded like in the email.
The third line of defense is accepting that this is the job. Not because the nephew is right — often the nephew is emphatically wrong — but because client management is creative work too, and how you handle the nephew situation says as much about your professionalism as the work you delivered.
The KPI Shark notebook is ideal for writing down what you wish you’d said to the nephew in a format that never gets sent. Highly therapeutic. Highly recommended.
A Note for the Nephews Reading This
If you have opinions about design: excellent. Opinions are the beginning of taste. If those opinions are being relayed to a professional who has been hired, briefed, and paid to deliver a specific result: please consider that there is context you don’t have. The blue might be flat because the brand is deliberately restrained. The font might feel boring because legibility at small sizes was a requirement. The “energy” you’re missing might have been in the version before the client asked for it to be removed.
You’re not wrong to have the feeling. You’re just maybe not the right person to act on it in this particular chain. Visit No Briefs Club when you’re ready to develop your opinions into expertise. We’ll be here.
