por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
There was a time when “storytelling” in a business context was a useful idea. The insight — that humans process information most effectively when it’s organized narratively, that data embedded in a story is retained better than data presented as data — is empirically grounded. The application to marketing and communication made sense: instead of listing product features, show a person whose life is changed by the product. Instead of citing statistics, make the statistics into a character with a journey. Good advice. The problem, as with all good advice that enters the marketing industry, is what happened next.
The Colonization of a Word
At some point in the early 2010s — the exact date is lost to the archaeology of conference presentations — “storytelling” became the answer to every question about content, communication, and brand identity. What should our content strategy be? Storytelling. How do we differentiate our brand? Storytelling. Why isn’t our B2B marketing working? Not enough storytelling. What do we put in this slide about quarterly earnings? A story.
The word spread with the speed and indiscrimination of a virus encountering a population with no immunity. It appeared in agency credentials decks. It appeared in CMO job descriptions. It appeared in the LinkedIn bios of professionals who had never written a narrative sentence in their lives but had attended a workshop and were now, apparently, storytellers. It appeared in brand guidelines. It appeared in the description of services offered by consulting firms that help companies restructure their supply chains.
The supply chain consultants are still not telling stories, by the way. They are making decks about supply chains. But the decks now have a slide that uses the word “narrative.”
What “Storytelling” Now Means in Practice
When a client briefs an agency on “storytelling,” the instruction means approximately nothing specific. It may mean they want emotionally resonant content. It may mean they want a content series rather than individual posts. It may mean they want a brand origin myth. It may mean the CEO read a Seth Godin book over the weekend and wants to be exciting now. It may mean they saw a competitor’s campaign and liked the feeling of it without being able to specify why.
The word has been used to describe so many different things — content marketing, brand narrative, PR pitching, investor communications, user journey documentation, employee onboarding — that it no longer describes any of them usefully. When a brief says “we want to tell our brand story,” the creative team knows exactly as much as they did before reading it. Which is to say: nothing actionable.
This is the fate of words that become fashionable in industries that run on language. They get used until they’re smooth. “Innovation.” “Disruption.” “Authentic.” “Purpose-driven.” Each of these entered the marketing lexicon carrying real meaning and departed as meaningless decoration after approximately three years of conference panel overexposure. “Storytelling” was the same.
What Was Actually Good About the Original Idea
The underlying insight, stripped of the buzzword packaging, remains valid. Human beings are narrative creatures. We remember stories. We are moved by stories. We make sense of the world through stories. A brand that understands this and applies it with skill and discipline will communicate more effectively than one that doesn’t.
But applying it with skill and discipline requires actually understanding what a story is. Not a case study formatted as a journey. Not a video with a piano soundtrack and slow-motion footage of meaningful moments. An actual narrative structure: a protagonist with a specific problem, a genuine obstacle, a resolution that changes their situation in a concrete way. Most of what the marketing industry calls “storytelling” does not meet this definition. It is mood, or texture, or character illustration. These are fine things. They are not stories.
The word policed its own meaning by becoming too popular to mean anything. What the industry needs now is not a new buzzword to replace storytelling but a willingness to be specific about what it actually wants: emotional resonance, narrative structure, character development, situational specificity. Say those things. The brief will be better.
The Briefing Problem
The reason “storytelling” persists despite its emptiness is that it does something useful for the person writing the brief: it sounds aspirational without committing to anything specific. “We want storytelling” communicates a desired quality — something that feels human, connected, emotionally engaging — without requiring the brief-writer to specify what that means in concrete terms. It is aspirational hand-waving, and it is comfortable because it defers the hard work of definition to the creative team.
This is, in a very literal sense, what Fuck The Brief is about. Not a rejection of the brief as a document but a rejection of the brief as permission to be vague. A good brief makes the creative work easier, not harder. A brief that says “storytelling” without defining terms has made the creative work harder while giving everyone involved the illusion of having been helpful.
The word is not coming back. Not as a useful term of art, anyway. It has been used too many times, in too many directions, by too many people who were using it as a synonym for “not boring.” That’s fine. The concept it was pointing at — the power of narrative in human communication — survives perfectly well without it. Use that concept. Describe it precisely. Leave the word in the pitch deck graveyard where it belongs.
→ If your last brief contained the word “storytelling” without further specification: we’ve all been there. NoBriefs — where the brief comes to be honest with itself.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
There is a particular kind of marketing presentation that has become so common it has its own grammar. It begins with a slide showing a significant increase in a metric — follower count, impressions, share of voice, engagement rate — rendered in large, bold typography with an upward arrow. Then several more slides of similar statistics. Then a summary slide that describes the campaign as a success. And then, somewhere deep in the appendix, often in a smaller font, a note that conversion rates were flat and attributed revenue did not meet projections.
This is what we might call the Ego KPI cycle, and it is one of the most expensive habits in marketing.
What Makes a KPI Vanity
A vanity metric is not necessarily a fake metric. The numbers are often real. The problem is that they measure something that feels good — reach, attention, brand presence — without establishing a causal or even correlational relationship with business outcomes. An impression is not a customer. A follower is not a fan. Engagement on a brand awareness post is not a signal of purchase intent unless you have data suggesting otherwise, and most brands do not have that data.
The term “vanity metric” is sometimes dismissed as reductive. Fair enough. Some metrics that look like vanity metrics are actually leading indicators of real outcomes — in the right context, with the right audience, with the right product, share of voice genuinely predicts market share. The point is not that these metrics are always useless. The point is that they are routinely reported as success indicators in contexts where their relationship to business outcomes has never been established. That is the problem.
The ego in “ego KPI” refers not to arrogance but to the function the metric serves: it makes the marketing function feel good. It makes the brand team look productive. It satisfies a stakeholder request for evidence of activity. It provides a defensible answer to the question “what did we accomplish?” None of this is about the business. It is about the comfort of the people doing the reporting.
How We Got Here
Digital marketing promised to end the era of unmeasurable advertising. “Half of my advertising budget is wasted; I just don’t know which half” was supposed to become a relic. Instead, we replaced unmeasurable impact with highly measurable activity, called the activity impact, and continued as before with better slides.
Part of the problem is attribution. Measuring the true contribution of a piece of brand content to a purchase that happens three months later is genuinely difficult. In the absence of a clean causal story, marketers default to what they can measure: the immediate response to the content. Clicks. Shares. Views. These are measurable in real time. They are legible to non-specialists. They are easy to present. And so they become the default language of marketing performance, regardless of whether they’re actually measuring performance.
Another part of the problem is incentive misalignment. Marketing teams are often evaluated on the metrics they report. If impressions are in the KPIs and revenue is not, the team will optimize for impressions. This is rational behavior. The problem is structural, not moral.
The Metrics That Actually Matter
They vary by business and by objective, but they share a common property: they measure something that the business would care about even if marketing hadn’t invented it. Customer acquisition cost. Retention rate. Revenue attributable to marketing activity (with honest caveats about attribution methodology). Pipeline influenced. Net Promoter Score trends. Cost per qualified lead. Lifetime value of customers acquired through specific channels.
None of these metrics are as photogenic as a million impressions. None of them produce the same immediate dopamine hit as a slide showing 400% reach growth. But they are connected to the actual health of the business, which is, nominally, the point.
The shift requires honesty about what you don’t know as much as clarity about what you do. A responsible marketing report includes its own limitations: here’s what we can measure, here’s what we’re inferring, here’s where the data doesn’t let us draw a clean conclusion. This is harder to present than a deck full of upward arrows. It is also the only way to actually improve.
The Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
At some point, someone in the room needs to ask: “These numbers are going up. Why isn’t the business?” That person will not be popular. They may be told that brand marketing works on long time horizons. They may be directed to the share of voice data. They may be reminded that awareness must precede consideration must precede conversion. All of these are true, and all of them are also classic techniques for deferring accountability indefinitely.
The honest answer is usually: we don’t know what’s working and what isn’t, because we’re not measuring the right things. And the first step to measuring the right things is being willing to present the wrong numbers as wrong rather than as success with asterisks.
At NoBriefs, the KPI Shark is built for precisely this moment: when the metrics are beautiful and the business is stagnant and someone needs to say so out loud. Not to be difficult. To be useful.
→ Your impressions are not your impact. If the difference keeps you up at night, you’re at the right place. NoBriefs — for the marketers who’ve started asking harder questions.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
There is a PowerPoint slide that has been presented in marketing departments and agency new business meetings for approximately fifteen years. It features a graph — sometimes a hockey stick, sometimes an exponential curve — and the words “viral potential” written somewhere in the vicinity of the upward inflection. This slide is fraudulent. Not intentionally, in most cases. The people presenting it genuinely believe that virality is a replicable outcome of a sufficiently clever strategy. They are wrong, and the fact that they continue to be wrong at scale says something important about the marketing industry’s relationship with honesty.
What “Going Viral” Actually Means
A piece of content goes viral when a large number of people share it in a short period of time, producing exponential rather than linear distribution. This is a real phenomenon. It happens. But understanding that it happens is not the same as understanding how to make it happen, any more than understanding that lightning strikes trees gives you the ability to direct lightning.
Retrospective analysis of viral content almost always produces confident-sounding explanations: it was emotionally resonant, it was unexpected, it tapped into a cultural moment, it was perfectly timed. These explanations are largely post-hoc rationalization. For every piece of content with those properties that went viral, there are ten thousand with identical properties that did not. We study the successes and ignore the failures, which produces the illusion of a pattern where there is mostly noise.
This is survivorship bias at industrial scale, and it is the foundation on which a significant portion of content strategy is built.
The Viral Content Industry
There is an entire ecosystem of professionals whose value proposition is some version of “I know how to make things go viral.” Courses. Frameworks. Books with titles like The Virality Code or Contagious: Why Things Catch On (that last one is real and, to be fair, considerably more honest about uncertainty than most). LinkedIn influencers who post their own viral metrics as proof of expertise. Agencies with case studies about the one time a campaign blew up and carefully constructed silence about the twenty times it didn’t.
None of this is entirely without value. Understanding the structural properties of shareable content — emotional resonance, novelty, social currency, practical utility — is useful. You can increase the probability of your content performing well by understanding these principles. But “increased probability of performing well” and “guaranteed viral reach” are not the same thing, and the marketing industry, chronically allergic to nuance, tends to collapse them into each other.
What You Can Actually Control
Here is what a responsible content strategy looks like in the absence of a virality guarantee: you create high-quality, genuinely useful or genuinely entertaining content, consistently, for a clearly defined audience. You distribute it through channels where that audience actually exists. You optimize for the metrics that matter to your business — leads, retention, purchase intent — rather than for the vanity metrics that are most likely to impress a client in a quarterly report.
Over time, you build a body of work that compounds. Individual pieces rarely go “viral” in the dramatic, hockey-stick sense. But a sustained practice of excellent content builds authority, trust, and a loyal audience that shares your work not because an algorithm decided to amplify it but because they genuinely find it valuable. This is slower than a viral moment. It is also more durable.
The occasional piece will outperform your expectations dramatically. It will happen without warning, often for reasons you can only partially explain. When it does, study it, learn what you can, and resist the urge to try to replicate it exactly. Lightning does not strike the same tree twice in the same way for the same reasons.
What to Tell the Client Who Wants Virality
Tell them the truth. Which is: we can create content that has the properties associated with high performance, and we can distribute it effectively. We cannot guarantee a specific reach multiple. Anyone who promises you a viral outcome is either lying or doesn’t understand the medium they’re working in — and either way, you shouldn’t be paying them for the promise.
Some clients will not want to hear this. They will hire someone who tells them what they want to hear. In three months, when that someone’s “viral strategy” produces eleven thousand views on a video that cost forty thousand to make, you can be there with an honest alternative. Or not. Sometimes the market rewards the right answer with a long delay.
In the meantime, the KPI Shark at NoBriefs is a good reminder: the metrics that matter are the ones connected to actual business outcomes. Shares are flattering. Revenue is real. Build for the second one.
→ Stop chasing lightning and start building for consistent thunder. NoBriefs — for marketers who’ve graduated from vanity and enrolled in value.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
Somewhere in your organization — or your client’s organization, which is effectively the same thing — there is a wall. On this wall, in tasteful typography, are three things: the Mission, the Vision, and the Values. The Mission tells you why the company exists. The Vision describes the world it’s trying to create. The Values list the principles that guide behavior. Together they form a triptych of aspirational prose that took a committee six months to produce and that approximately nobody has read since the internal announcement email was archived.
This is not a cynical observation. It is an empirical one. And it matters, because enormous resources continue to flow into creating, refreshing, and communicating these documents — resources that could be deployed against problems that actually affect performance.
How the Triptych Gets Made
The process is almost always the same. A senior leader — usually prompted by a strategic review, a rebrand, or a new CMO who needs a quick win — announces that the company’s MVV (Mission, Vision, Values, because everything needs an acronym) needs to be revisited. A working group is formed. It includes people from HR, Communications, the C-suite, and one or two “culture ambassadors” who are well-liked and strategically placed.
Multiple workshops happen. Facilitated by an external consultant who charges four figures a day to ask questions the team could have asked themselves. Post-its are written and arranged into themes. Themes are clustered and named. Names are refined. Words are debated — “innovation” vs. “curiosity,” “integrity” vs. “honesty,” “excellence” vs. “quality” — with a seriousness of purpose that would be appropriate for a legal document rather than for what is, in effect, an aspiration statement.
After months of this, something emerges. It is polished. It is inoffensive. It is almost indistinguishable from the equivalent document at any other company in the sector. It is approved at the board level. It is rolled out with a Town Hall. And then it is laminated and put on the wall, where it will remain until the next strategic review, unchanged, unread, and untested.
Why They Don’t Work
The core problem is that Mission, Vision, and Values documents are designed to be universally agreeable rather than operationally useful. They have to work for every employee, in every role, in every geography, across every scenario. This requirement — universality — is structurally incompatible with the other requirement — specificity. A value that applies to everyone in every situation is a value with no real content.
“We act with integrity.” Against what alternative? “We put customers first.” Unless we don’t, in which case we use a different value. “We are bold and curious.” On Tuesdays, when the quarterly numbers are good. The statements are not false. They are empty. And empty principles cannot guide behavior because they contain no information about what to do in the situations where behavior actually needs guiding.
Real organizational values — the ones that actually shape culture — are not the ones on the wall. They are the answers to specific, uncomfortable questions: When a client asks for something unethical, what happens? When a high-performer behaves badly, what is tolerated? When short-term profit conflicts with long-term reputation, which wins? The wall doesn’t answer these questions. The answers live in the decisions that get made when nobody thinks anyone is watching.
What Good Looks Like
There are organizations whose stated values genuinely influence behavior. What distinguishes them is not the elegance of the prose but the specificity of the application. Instead of “we act with integrity,” they say: here is what integrity means when a supplier cuts corners, when a colleague takes credit for your work, when a client wants you to obscure data in a report. Instead of “we put customers first,” they have mechanisms — real ones, with owners and consequences — for surfacing and responding to customer problems.
Values that work are values that are tested. Organizations that take their values seriously will occasionally let revenue walk out the door because taking the money would violate them. They will have uncomfortable conversations with high-performers who don’t live the values. They will make decisions that are hard to explain to shareholders but easy to explain to employees. This is a high bar. Most organizations do not clear it.
The honest thing to do, if you work in an organization that has values on the wall and decisions that contradict them, is not to dismiss the gap cynically — it’s to name it. “Our stated value is X. Our current practice is Y. Here’s what it would take to close that gap.” That conversation is worth infinitely more than the next workshop about word choice.
And if you’re the one writing the brand values for a client? At NoBriefs, the Fuck The Brief ethos applies here too: no amount of beautiful language substitutes for clarity about what the organization actually does when things get hard. Ask the hard questions. Put the answers in the document. The rest is decoration.
→ The values on the wall are not the values. The decisions made under pressure are the values. NoBriefs — for people who’ve noticed the difference.
por Ber | Abr 8, 2026 | Uncategorized
Here is an observation that sounds like a joke but is clinically documented: the people most likely to feel like frauds are the people least likely to be frauds. Impostor syndrome — the persistent internal experience that your success is undeserved, that you’ve fooled everyone, that you will eventually be exposed — disproportionately affects high achievers. People who are genuinely incompetent rarely worry about being incompetent. They lack the metacognitive sophistication required to accurately assess their own limitations. You, presumably, do not have this problem.
This does not make impostor syndrome easier to live with. But it’s worth knowing.
What Impostor Syndrome Actually Is
The term was coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who studied high-achieving women and found a consistent pattern: despite objective evidence of competence, these individuals attributed their success to luck, timing, or interpersonal charm rather than actual ability. They feared, at some level, that a test would come — a real test — and they would fail it.
The pattern, it turned out, was not limited to women. It affects an estimated 70% of people at some point in their careers. Creative professionals, in particular, are vulnerable. The reason is structural: creative work is inherently subjective, its value is contested, and its production depends on a kind of confident ambiguity — you have to be willing to make things without knowing if they’ll be good until they’re done. This uncertainty is fertile ground for the internal voice that says: you have no idea what you’re doing.
That voice is lying. Or, more precisely, it is taking a real thing — the legitimate uncertainty of creative work — and converting it into a false personal verdict. Not knowing if an idea will land is not the same as not knowing what you’re doing.
The Creative Industry Makes This Worse
The advertising and design and content industries have a particular talent for cultivating insecurity. Awards culture creates a hierarchy of validation that most people never receive, even the good ones. Peer comparison is constant and often decontextualized — you see someone’s highlight reel, their best work, their LinkedIn announcements, and you measure it against your daily reality of rejected concepts and difficult clients and projects you’re not proud of.
There is also a strange prestige hierarchy within creative work itself. The people who work on famous brands with big budgets are accorded more status than those who do excellent work in less glamorous sectors. The implication — never stated, always felt — is that if you were truly good, you’d be working on something famous. This is nonsense. Some of the most skilled professionals in the industry work on projects the world will never see, for clients who appreciate them, doing work they’re genuinely proud of. The work doesn’t know what the award judges think of it.
Practical Strategies That Actually Help
First: document the evidence. Keep a folder — physical or digital — of the work you’re proud of, the feedback that was genuine, the problems you solved that seemed impossible at the time. When the impostor voice is loudest, this folder is a reality check. Not proof that you’re perfect. Proof that the narrative of fraud doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
Second: distinguish between the feeling and the fact. “I feel like a fraud” and “I am a fraud” are not the same sentence. Feelings are not evidence. You are allowed to feel uncertain while acting from a place of competence. In fact, this combination — internal uncertainty, external steadiness — is one of the defining characteristics of genuinely experienced professionals.
Third: talk about it. Impostor syndrome thrives in silence and isolation. The moment you mention it to a trusted peer — a real one, not a social media acquaintance — you will almost certainly discover that they feel exactly the same way. This is not comforting in the way that someone patting your shoulder is comforting. It is comforting in the way that evidence is comforting. You are not uniquely deficient. You are human.
When Impostor Syndrome Is Trying to Tell You Something
There is one use for the impostor voice that deserves acknowledgment: it sometimes carries a signal worth listening to. Not the global verdict — “you’re a fraud” — but a more specific concern: “you’ve been coasting on this,” or “you accepted a project outside your genuine expertise,” or “you haven’t updated your skills in two years.” In these cases, the anxiety is pointing at something real, and the healthy response is not to dismiss it but to address the underlying issue.
The distinction between productive self-doubt and impostor syndrome is whether the feeling is attached to a specific, fixable gap or is a diffuse cloud of unworthiness that follows you regardless of evidence. One is useful. The other is noise.
Live with the noise. Learn from the signal. Keep making work. And if you need a reminder that the creative life is genuinely hard and that’s fine, the Spreadsheet Sloth at NoBriefs was designed for people who understand that doing good work doesn’t require pretending it’s easy.
→ You’ve been doing this longer than you think and better than you feel. NoBriefs — for creatives who are finally done being their own worst client.
