por Ber | Mar 31, 2026 | Uncategorized
It finally happened. The machine made an ad. Not a weird, uncanny-valley fever dream with seven fingers and a logo that melts into a face — although those still exist and are deeply entertaining. A proper ad. Headline, visual, call to action, brand consistency. Ten minutes. Five variations. Zero existential crises. The creative director looked at the output, then looked at the brief, then looked at the twelve rounds of client feedback that would have inevitably destroyed anything a human team produced, and thought: “Honestly? The AI’s version is better. Not because it’s more creative. Because it never had to survive a committee.”
The Uncomfortable Truth About AI and Taste
Here’s the thing nobody in the industry wants to say out loud: for a significant percentage of advertising — the functional, workaday, keep-the-lights-on kind — AI doesn’t need to be brilliant. It needs to be competent. And competent is exactly what most clients have been asking for all along. “Make it clean. Make it clear. Make the logo bigger. Use this stock photo. Match the competitor’s layout.” These are not creative challenges. These are assembly instructions. And machines are very, very good at following assembly instructions.
The irony is almost poetic. For years, creatives have complained that clients don’t appreciate great work — that they water down bold ideas, default to safe choices, and end up with ads that could belong to any brand in any category. Now a machine can produce exactly that kind of work, faster and cheaper, and the industry is panicking. But the industry created this market. Every time a creative team delivered a bland, committee-approved piece of wallpaper advertising and called it “on-brand,” they were training the market to expect exactly what AI can now provide. The machine didn’t steal creativity. It automated mediocrity. And mediocrity was already the dominant product.
The uncomfortable corollary is that AI-generated ads are sometimes better than what emerges from the traditional process — not because the AI is more talented, but because it’s immune to the forces that destroy good work. The AI doesn’t have feelings that get hurt by vague feedback. It doesn’t get demoralized by the sixth revision. It doesn’t sit in a meeting quietly seething while a client explains that their spouse thought the color should be different. The AI just generates, adjusts, and regenerates. It’s the creative process stripped of politics, ego, and pain. Which is also the creative process stripped of humanity, but we’ll get to that.
What AI Can’t Do (Yet) (But Thinks It Can)
The AI generates competent advertising the way a GPS generates competent directions — efficiently, reliably, and without any understanding of why you’re going where you’re going. It can make an ad that hits every functional requirement. It cannot make an ad that makes someone feel something they’ve never felt before. It can write a headline that communicates the proposition. It cannot write a headline that makes a stranger stop scrolling, put down their coffee, and think about their life.
The gap between functional and remarkable is where human creativity lives, and that gap is wider than the AI evangelists want to admit. AI can interpolate between existing references — it can give you something that looks like the best of what already exists, remixed and recombined. What it can’t do is extrapolate — create something that doesn’t yet exist, something that breaks the pattern instead of perfecting it. The Volkswagen “Think Small” campaign wasn’t an interpolation of existing car ads. It was a rejection of everything car ads had been. AI can’t make that leap, because making that leap requires understanding not just what the audience expects, but what they’re tired of.
There’s also the context problem. AI doesn’t understand culture the way humans do. It can analyze sentiment data and trending topics, but it can’t feel the room. It doesn’t know that a certain phrase has become a meme, that a certain visual style now reads as ironic rather than sincere, that a certain cultural moment has shifted the meaning of words overnight. Culture is a living conversation, and AI reads the transcript — it doesn’t participate in the dialogue.
The Real Threat Isn’t AI — It’s the Client Who Doesn’t Know the Difference
The existential risk for creatives isn’t that AI will replace great work. It’s that the market won’t demand great work. If a client can get “good enough” in ten minutes for a fraction of the cost, the business case for “exceptional” becomes harder to make. And in an industry where procurement departments already treat creativity as a commodity, “good enough” is a very attractive proposition.
This is the KPI Shark problem at its most acute. When the metrics say the AI-generated version performs within five percent of the human-created version, the spreadsheet says go with the machine. The spreadsheet doesn’t measure the brand equity lost when every ad looks the same. It doesn’t quantify the cultural relevance surrendered when every piece of content is an average of existing content. It doesn’t capture the talent attrition when the best creatives leave an industry that no longer values what they do. The KPIs say the machine won. The KPIs are measuring the wrong game.
The clients who understand this — the ones who know that distinctive creativity is a competitive advantage, not a luxury — will continue to hire human teams. They’ll use AI as a tool, not a replacement. They’ll let the machine handle the production work while humans focus on the strategic and conceptual work that actually differentiates brands. These clients are rare. They’ve always been rare. But they’re the ones worth working for.
What Creatives Should Actually Do About All This
First, stop pretending AI isn’t happening. The ostrich strategy — head in sand, fingers in ears, “real creativity can never be automated” — is naive and professionally dangerous. AI is here. It’s getting better. And it’s going to absorb a significant portion of the production work that currently employs a lot of people. Denying this doesn’t make it less true. It just makes you less prepared.
Second, move up the value chain. If AI can generate a competent ad in ten minutes, your value isn’t in generating competent ads. Your value is in knowing which ad to generate. In understanding the audience deeply enough to write a brief that produces breakthrough work — whether a human or a machine executes it. In having the taste to distinguish between good and great, between functional and remarkable, between content that fills a feed and content that changes a conversation.
Third, lean into the things AI can’t do. Be weird. Be human. Be specific. Be culturally embedded. Make work that requires understanding of irony, nuance, subtext, and the messy, irrational way humans actually think and feel. The more predictable and formulaic the work, the more vulnerable it is to automation. The more unpredictable and human, the more irreplaceable you become.
Fourth, use AI as a creative partner, not a threat. Let it handle the first draft while you handle the edit. Let it generate a hundred variations while you curate the three that matter. Let it do the heavy lifting on production while you focus on the concept that makes the production worth doing. The creatives who thrive in the AI era won’t be the ones who ignore it or the ones who surrender to it. They’ll be the ones who use it as a tool and bring what the tool cannot — judgment, empathy, and the courage to make something that’s never existed before.
And when the machine generates something that’s actually pretty good, don’t panic. Just put on your Fuck The Brief hoodie and remind yourself: the machine followed the brief perfectly. That’s exactly why it’s boring.
Still more creative than the algorithm? Prove it. Visit nobriefsclub.com/shop and wear the insurgency.
por Ber | Mar 31, 2026 | Uncategorized
The quarterly business review is the corporate world’s most reliable piece of performance art. Four times a year, marketing teams across the globe spend two weeks assembling a presentation that distills three months of work into forty-five minutes of carefully curated narrative. Results are up? Act one: triumph. Results are down? Act one: context. Either way, the script follows the same arc — a hero’s journey where the hero is a bar chart and the villain is seasonality, algorithm changes, or “market headwinds,” which is executive-speak for “things didn’t work and we’d rather not discuss why.”
Act One: The Setup (Also Known as the Spin)
Every QBR begins with “the highlights.” This is the section where the team presents whatever went right, regardless of whether it was planned, intentional, or remotely connected to the strategy. A social media post went viral? Highlight. An email campaign outperformed benchmarks? Highlight. A blog article got picked up by a trade publication because the editor’s cousin works in your marketing department? Highlight. The highlights section exists to create momentum before the inevitable second act, where things get complicated.
The data in the highlights section is always presented in its most flattering light. Percentages are used when the absolute numbers are embarrassing. “Engagement increased by 200%” sounds impressive until you realize it went from two interactions to six. Year-over-year comparisons are deployed when this quarter was mediocre but last year’s was catastrophic. Month-over-month is preferred when the trend is upward but the annual picture is grim. The QBR doesn’t lie, exactly. It just has a very selective relationship with the truth.
Every number in the deck has been pre-negotiated. The marketing manager checked with the analytics team. The analytics team checked with the CMO. The CMO checked with their gut feeling about what the CEO wants to hear. By the time a metric reaches the presentation, it has been translated, interpreted, and formatted to tell a story that makes the room feel good. This is not analysis. This is public relations for internal audiences.
Act Two: The Challenges (Formerly Known as Failures)
No QBR acknowledges failure directly. Instead, there are “challenges,” “learnings,” and “areas of opportunity.” The campaign that tanked isn’t presented as a failure — it’s presented as a “test that generated valuable insights.” The product launch that nobody noticed isn’t a flop — it’s a “soft launch that established foundational awareness.” The influencer partnership that went sideways isn’t a waste of budget — it’s a “pilot program that informed our creator strategy going forward.”
The language of the QBR is a masterclass in corporate euphemism. “We underperformed against target” means the team missed by a mile. “We pivoted mid-quarter” means the original plan failed and they scrambled. “Results were impacted by external factors” means the team doesn’t want to explain what went wrong because the explanation involves decisions made by someone in the room.
This section is where the KPI Shark bares its teeth. The QBR’s relationship with KPIs is deeply dysfunctional. Targets that were hit get celebrated. Targets that were missed get explained. Targets that were quietly changed mid-quarter get ignored entirely. The KPI framework — which should be a tool for honest assessment — becomes a game where the rules are adjusted to ensure the team always finishes within an acceptable distance of winning.
Act Three: The Plan (The Same Plan, Slightly Reformatted)
Having established that the quarter was either a triumph or a learning experience, the QBR moves to “next steps.” This section is where the team presents what they intend to do next quarter, which is almost always a slightly modified version of what they planned to do last quarter. The content calendar will be “optimized.” The social media strategy will be “elevated.” The email program will be “refined.” These verbs — optimize, elevate, refine — are the corporate equivalent of rearranging furniture. The room looks different, but nothing has actually changed.
The next-quarter plan follows a predictable formula: double down on what worked, adjust what didn’t, and introduce one new initiative that sounds innovative but carries minimal risk. This new initiative — usually a platform expansion, a content format, or a partnership — serves a dual purpose: it gives the team something fresh to talk about in next quarter’s QBR, and it gives the CMO something to mention in their update to the board. The initiative may or may not succeed, but its primary function is narrative, not strategic.
Budget discussions, if they happen at all, are handled with the delicacy of a bomb disposal. Nobody wants to say “we need more money” in a room where “efficiency” is a stated corporate value. So instead, the team says “we see an opportunity to accelerate growth with incremental investment” — which means the same thing but sounds like ambition instead of a complaint. The budget conversation is the QBR’s most choreographed moment, rehearsed beforehand with the precision of a diplomatic negotiation.
Act Four: The Standing Ovation (That Changes Nothing)
The QBR ends. The CMO says “great work, team.” The CEO nods. Someone asks a question about attribution modeling that nobody can fully answer but everyone pretends to understand. The room disperses. The deck is emailed to attendees, who will file it in a folder they’ll never open again. And the marketing team returns to their desks, where the actual work — the messy, unscripted, unglamorous work — continues exactly as it did before the presentation.
Nothing changes after the QBR because the QBR isn’t designed to change anything. It’s designed to report. To document. To create a paper trail that proves the team was thinking, planning, and measuring. The QBR is a performance review dressed up as a strategy session, and like most performance reviews, it evaluates the past without meaningfully influencing the future.
The alternative? Kill the deck. Replace the QBR with a standing monthly conversation — no slides, no production, just honest discussion about what’s working, what isn’t, and what the team needs. A sixty-minute conversation with data on a shared screen generates more actionable insight than a forty-five-minute presentation that took two weeks to build. But that conversation requires vulnerability, and vulnerability doesn’t have a template. You can’t put honesty in 16:9 format with a gradient background and a brand-approved typeface.
Until organizations learn to have honest conversations about performance without the safety net of a scripted presentation, the QBR will persist. Four times a year, the curtain will rise. The cast will perform. The audience will applaud. And nothing will change — which, when you think about it, is the most consistent result the QBR has ever delivered.
Survived another quarterly review? Treat yourself at nobriefsclub.com/shop. Because the best performance isn’t in a deck — it’s on a Fuck The Brief t-shirt.
por Ber | Mar 31, 2026 | Uncategorized
Every January, a ritual unfolds across agencies and marketing departments worldwide. A strategy deck is born. It is sixty slides long, took three months to produce, and contains the phrase “consumer-centric ecosystem” at least four times. It has a section called “Our North Star” that features an actual illustration of a star. There is a slide titled “Key Strategic Pillars” with exactly four pillars, because three felt insufficient and five felt chaotic. The deck is presented to leadership with gravitas. It is applauded. It is emailed to forty-seven people. It is never opened again. And by March, the organization is doing exactly what it was doing in November, just with a new Pantone color and a slightly different mission statement.
The Deck Industrial Complex
Strategy decks have become the creative industry’s most elaborate form of professional theater. They exist not to change behavior but to create the perception that behavior has been considered. The deck is the artifact that proves strategy happened — a tangible deliverable that can be referenced in board meetings and stakeholder updates without anyone needing to explain what, specifically, has changed as a result.
The production process itself has become an industry within an industry. There are people whose entire job is making strategy decks — not doing strategy, mind you, but formatting strategy into slides. There are templates, design systems, and entire agencies dedicated to the craft of making complex ideas look simple on a 16:9 canvas. The medium has consumed the message. The deck is no longer a vehicle for strategy. It is the strategy, and that’s where everything falls apart.
Because a strategy isn’t a deck. A strategy is a set of choices about what to do and — more importantly — what not to do. It’s a framework for decision-making that should make every subsequent choice easier and more coherent. But you can’t put “we’re choosing not to do things” on a slide without someone asking why we need a strategy team if the answer is “do less.” So instead, the deck says “do everything, but strategically,” which is the corporate equivalent of saying “eat everything, but healthily.” It sounds wise. It means nothing.
The Anatomy of a Strategy Nobody Follows
Slide one: A bold vision statement. Something about “redefining the category” or “leading the conversation.” Slide five: Market analysis. Data that confirms what everyone already suspected but presented with enough charts to look like original thinking. Slide fifteen: Consumer insights. A persona named “Digital Dave” or “Mindful Maya” who represents your target audience with the specificity of a horoscope and the accuracy of a fortune cookie.
Slide thirty: The strategy itself. Usually three to five “pillars” or “platforms” or “territories” — words chosen specifically because they’re abstract enough to accommodate whatever anyone wants to do next. A pillar called “Community” could mean a TikTok series, a loyalty program, or a literal community garden. Nobody knows, because the deck doesn’t specify. Specificity would mean commitment, and commitment would mean accountability, and accountability would mean someone might fail, and failure is not an option in a deck that costs six figures to produce.
Slide fifty-five: The roadmap. A beautifully designed timeline that maps twelve months of activity with the confidence of someone who has never experienced reality. Q1: “Foundation Phase.” Q2: “Activation Phase.” Q3: “Optimization Phase.” Q4: “Scale Phase.” These phases will be abandoned by March when the CEO decides to pivot to short-form video because they saw a competitor’s reel during lunch.
Why Strategies Fail Before They Start
The annual strategy fails for one fundamental reason: it separates thinking from doing. The people who write the strategy are rarely the people who execute it. The strategist hands the deck to the creative team, who interprets it through their own lens. The creative team hands it to the production team, who interprets it through their constraints. By the time the strategy reaches the customer, it’s been translated so many times it resembles the original about as much as a photocopy of a photocopy resembles the original document.
There’s also the shelf-life problem. An annual strategy assumes that the market will hold still for twelve months while you methodically execute your four pillars. But markets don’t hold still. A competitor launches something unexpected. A social platform changes its algorithm. A global event reshapes consumer behavior overnight. Your strategy, conceived in the calm of an October offsite, is now irrelevant by February. But nobody updates it, because updating the deck would mean admitting the original was wrong, and the original cost too much to be wrong.
The Spreadsheet Sloth knows this pain intimately — that feeling of watching a carefully planned strategy dissolve in the face of reality while the spreadsheet tracking its implementation remains frozen in time, a monument to what was supposed to happen versus what actually did.
What Would Actually Work Instead
Replace the annual strategy deck with a quarterly strategy brief. One page. Maximum. What are we trying to achieve in the next ninety days? What are we not doing? How will we know if it’s working? Review it every quarter. Adjust based on what you learned. This isn’t sexy. It doesn’t fill a boardroom presentation or justify a six-month engagement. But it works, because it forces specificity and demands regular accountability.
Kill the pillars. Replace them with bets. “We believe that if we do X, Y will happen.” Bets are testable. Pillars are decorative. A bet says “we think short-form educational content will increase consideration among 25-34-year-olds by fifteen percent.” A pillar says “Content Excellence.” One can be proven right or wrong. The other just sits there, looking important, being useless.
Involve the doers in the thinking. The best strategies emerge from teams who will execute them, not from consultants who will present them and leave. When the creative team, the media team, and the analytics team are in the room shaping the strategy, they own it. Ownership produces commitment. Commitment produces execution. Execution produces results. And results, unlike decks, actually matter.
Finally, make the strategy visible. Not in a deck that lives in a shared drive, but on a wall, in a Slack channel, in every brief and every review. If people can’t recite your strategy from memory, it’s too complicated. The best strategies fit on a Post-it note. The worst fit in sixty slides. Aim for the Post-it.
Another strategy gathering dust? At least make your wardrobe strategic. Visit nobriefsclub.com/shop — where every piece is a statement that actually gets executed.
por Ber | Mar 31, 2026 | Uncategorized
Somewhere in a shared drive, gathering digital dust between the Q3 marketing plan and a spreadsheet titled “FINAL_FINAL_v3,” lives a document that took eight weeks, four workshops, and two agency retainers to create. It’s the brand voice guide. It is fifty-seven pages long. It contains words like “empowering,” “human-centric,” and “boldly authentic.” It has been opened by three people since it was published, two of whom were looking for something else. The third was the person who wrote it, checking for typos. This is the state of brand voice in corporate communications, and it is a masterpiece of wasted potential.
The Adjective Graveyard
Every brand voice document begins with the same fatal flaw: it describes the brand using adjectives that could apply to literally any organization on earth. “We are warm, professional, and innovative.” Congratulations. So is every other company that has ever hired a branding consultant. You’ve just described the platonic ideal of a brand personality — pleasant, competent, and forward-thinking — which is to say, you’ve described nothing at all.
The problem with these adjectives is that they occupy the comfortable middle ground where no one disagrees and no one is inspired. “Warm” is safe. Nobody is going to argue that their brand should be cold. “Professional” is obvious. Nobody is pitching their brand as deliberately amateur. “Innovative” is aspirational in a way that requires no specific behavior. You can call yourself innovative while doing exactly what you did last year, as long as you add the word “reimagined” to the press release.
Real brand voice starts where comfort ends. It’s not about what you are — it’s about what you’re not. It’s about the things you’d never say, the tone you’d never take, the safe choices you’d actively reject. If your brand voice document doesn’t make at least one stakeholder uncomfortable, it’s not distinctive enough to matter. You haven’t defined a voice. You’ve defined a temperature — “lukewarm” — and called it a brand personality.
The Workshop That Produced Nothing Useful
The brand voice document typically emerges from a workshop. A room full of stakeholders — marketing, product, sales, sometimes even an actual customer if the agency is particularly adventurous — gathers for a half-day session involving sticky notes, marker pens, and the phrase “if our brand were a person, who would it be?” The answers always cluster around the same celebrities: someone who is smart but relatable, successful but humble, edgy but not offensive. The brand ends up being described as “the George Clooney of fintech” or “the Beyoncé of B2B SaaS,” which sounds inspiring in the workshop and means absolutely nothing when someone needs to write an error message for the checkout page.
The workshop fails because it asks the wrong questions. “What does our brand sound like?” is abstract to the point of uselessness. Better questions: “How would our brand apologize for a service outage?” “What would our brand say to a customer who’s about to leave for a competitor?” “How does our brand talk about its own failures?” These are the questions that produce actual voice — specific, testable, and immediately applicable. But they’re also uncomfortable, which is why they never get asked in the sticky-note session.
After the workshop, the agency retreats to produce the document. They take the sticky notes, the celebrity comparisons, and the list of aspirational adjectives, and they craft a PDF that looks beautiful and says nothing. There will be a spectrum — “We are bold, but not aggressive. Confident, but not arrogant.” These spectrums are the brand voice equivalent of saying “we like food, but not too spicy.” They’re guardrails so wide you could drive a truck through them without touching either side.
Why Nobody Uses the Guide (and What Would Actually Help)
The brand voice document fails not because the concept is wrong but because the execution is impractical. Fifty-seven pages of brand philosophy doesn’t help a social media manager who needs to respond to an angry customer in the next forty-five minutes. Theory doesn’t write tweets. Examples write tweets.
The most useful brand voice guides in the world are short — five pages maximum — and built entirely around examples. Here’s how we’d say this. Here’s how we wouldn’t. Here’s a before-and-after of a real piece of copy, transformed from generic to branded. Here’s our voice applied to an email subject line, a push notification, an apology, a celebration, and a product description. Show, don’t tell. Because telling a copywriter to “be boldly authentic” is like telling a chef to “cook deliciously.” It’s not guidance. It’s a wish.
The Fuck The Brief ethos understands this instinctively. Voice isn’t a theory — it’s a practice. It’s in the specific word choices, the sentence rhythms, the willingness to break convention when convention is boring. NoBriefs doesn’t need a fifty-seven-page guide to sound like NoBriefs. The voice lives in the work, not in a PDF.
Building a Voice That People Actually Use
If you’re responsible for brand voice, here’s a radical suggestion: kill the document. Replace it with a living resource — a Slack channel, a Notion page, a shared doc — that collects real examples of the voice in action. Every time someone writes something great, it goes in the collection. Every time someone writes something off-brand, the correction goes in too. Over time, this living library becomes infinitely more useful than any static PDF, because it reflects how the brand actually speaks, not how a consultant imagined it might speak during a Thursday workshop.
Create a “voice test” — three sentences that only your brand would say. If a competitor could say the same sentences without changing a word, they’re not distinctive enough. Push until the language is so specific to your organization that it couldn’t belong to anyone else. This is hard. This requires taste, courage, and a willingness to be imperfect. But imperfect and distinctive beats polished and generic every single time.
Train people, not just in the voice, but in the thinking behind the voice. Why do we use short sentences in our product copy? Because our users are busy and distracted. Why do we start emails with a question? Because it creates engagement. When people understand the principles, they can apply the voice to situations the guide never anticipated. And given how fast channels multiply and contexts shift, that adaptability is worth more than any spectrum of adjectives.
Finally, accept that voice evolves. The way your brand spoke three years ago might not work today. Markets shift, audiences change, cultural contexts move. The brand voice document that was “perfect” in 2023 is already aging. Build in a review cycle. Let the voice breathe. The best brands sound alive because they are — they’re constantly listening, adapting, and refining how they talk. The worst brands sound like they’re reading from a script, because they are, and the script was written by someone who left the company two years ago.
Got a brand voice guide collecting dust? At least your wardrobe can have personality. Visit nobriefsclub.com/shop — where the voice is always on-brand and never boring.
por Ber | Mar 31, 2026 | Uncategorized
Every Thursday at 10:15 AM, an email lands in nine hundred inboxes. It has a subject line that tries too hard — “This Week’s Wins! 🎉” or “The Buzz: What’s Happening Across Teams.” It contains a message from the CEO that was clearly written by someone who is not the CEO, a summary of a team-building event that twelve people attended, a reminder about the parking policy, and a photo of someone holding a certificate. Its open rate hovers around twelve percent, which the internal communications team reports as “strong engagement.” Nobody questions this number because nobody cares enough to question it. This is the internal newsletter. And it is the loneliest document in corporate America.
The Archaeology of Corporate Self-Talk
The internal newsletter exists at the intersection of two organizational anxieties: the fear that employees don’t know what’s happening, and the fear that if they did, they wouldn’t care. It’s a document designed to create the appearance of transparency without the inconvenience of actual transparency. The real news — the layoffs being planned, the product pivot being debated, the VP who’s about to “pursue other opportunities” — never appears in the newsletter. What appears instead is a carefully curated fiction of corporate harmony: people winning awards, teams hitting targets, and birthdays being celebrated.
Nobody reads the newsletter because nobody needs to. The information it contains is either already known (everyone knew about the office renovation because they’ve been hearing drills for three weeks), irrelevant (the sales team’s Q2 results mean nothing to the warehouse staff), or performative (a “spotlight” on an employee who was voluntold to participate). The newsletter answers questions nobody asked, in a format nobody requested, at a frequency nobody agreed to.
And yet it persists. Quarter after quarter, the communications team dutifully assembles another edition, soliciting content from department heads who treat the request like a homework assignment — completed grudgingly, submitted late, and written with the enthusiasm of a hostage reading a prepared statement. The result is a newsletter that reads like it was assembled by a committee of people who have never met each other, because functionally, that’s exactly what happened.
The Open Rate Illusion
Let’s talk about that twelve percent open rate. First, it’s inflated. Email preview panes trigger open tracking pixels, so a significant portion of those “opens” are people scrolling past the email on their way to something that actually matters. Second, “open” doesn’t mean “read.” Opening an email and reading an email are two fundamentally different activities, the same way picking up a book and reading a book are different. You can pick up Infinite Jest. That doesn’t make you a David Foster Wallace scholar.
The internal comms team knows this. Deep down, beneath the quarterly engagement report and the stakeholder satisfaction survey, they know the newsletter is a vanity project for the C-suite — a tangible artifact they can point to and say “look, we communicate.” It’s not communication. It’s broadcast. Communication implies a listener. The newsletter has senders and deleters, but precious few readers.
This is where the KPI Shark finds its natural habitat. The newsletter is the ultimate ego metric — a thing that gets measured not because the measurement matters, but because the act of measuring creates the illusion of value. Open rate, click-through rate, scroll depth — all carefully tracked, all utterly meaningless when the fundamental question remains: does anyone actually care about what we’re saying?
Why Companies Keep Publishing Newsletters Nobody Wants
The internal newsletter survives for the same reason most corporate traditions survive: inertia and fear. Stopping the newsletter feels like admitting that internal communication has failed. And nobody wants to be the person who killed the newsletter, because then every future communication gap — real or perceived — gets blamed on its absence. “We used to have a newsletter,” someone will say in a meeting eighteen months from now, as if that newsletter was the thing standing between organizational alignment and total chaos.
There’s also the sunk cost problem. Someone was hired to write the newsletter. There’s a template. There’s a distribution list. There’s a content calendar pinned to a wall somewhere. There’s an entire infrastructure built around producing a document that nobody asked for, and dismantling that infrastructure feels wasteful. So instead of killing the newsletter, organizations do something worse: they “refresh” it. New design. New name. Same content. Same open rate. Now featuring a Spotify playlist from the CEO.
The truth that nobody wants to confront is that most internal communication problems can’t be solved by newsletters. They’re solved by managers who actually talk to their teams. By leaders who share information directly, honestly, and in context. By Slack channels, town halls, and the radical act of walking over to someone’s desk and telling them what they need to know. The newsletter is a substitute for leadership communication, and substitutes rarely satisfy.
What Would Actually Work Instead
If you must have internal communications (and yes, at a certain scale, you must), consider this: respect the reader’s time. No one needs a weekly newsletter. Monthly is plenty. Quarterly might be better. Each edition should contain exactly three things: something the reader didn’t know, something the reader needs to do, and something that makes the reader feel connected to the organization’s purpose. That’s it. No parking reminders. No birthday lists. No CEO messages ghostwritten by an intern.
Make it scannable. If your newsletter requires more than ninety seconds to consume, it’s too long. The irony of internal communications is that the people who write them love words, and the people who receive them have no time for them. Write for the scanner, not the reader. Bold the action items. Link to the details. Get out of the way.
Most importantly, measure what matters. Stop celebrating open rates and start measuring whether the newsletter changes behavior. Did employees who read about the new benefits policy actually enroll? Did the team that was featured see an increase in cross-departmental collaboration? If the newsletter isn’t changing anything, it’s not communicating. It’s just making noise. And there’s already plenty of noise in the average employee’s inbox — 121 emails per day, according to the research, and your newsletter is competing with every single one.
Or, and hear me out, just stop. Stop the newsletter. See if anyone notices. If they don’t — and they probably won’t — you’ve just saved your communications team forty hours a month that could be spent on work that actually matters. Like, say, helping the CEO learn to communicate directly. Now that would be worth reading about. And worth wearing — grab the Spreadsheet Sloth to commemorate every hour you’ve spent formatting content nobody consumed.
Working on comms that nobody reads? You’re not alone. Visit nobriefsclub.com/shop and join the insurgency.
