“I don't like it”
is not feedback.

How to judge creative work without hiding behind personal taste.

This is part two of two, on writing briefs and reviewing campaign work. Part one is the draw a dog brief.

So the work comes back. You wrote a proper brief. You showed your dog. Now the visuals are on the table. This is where most campaigns are lost.

Someone senior leans back and says “I'm not sure I like it.” The room reorganises around that sentence in seconds. People who had a different view a moment ago start nodding. The work is now on trial. The charge is that one person did not feel a spark.

“I don't like it” is the most expensive sentence in marketing. It sounds like judgement. It carries all the confidence of a verdict. But it tells you nothing about whether the work will do its job. It is the absence of feedback wearing a confident voice.

Taste is the path of least resistance. It needs no preparation, no reference back to the brief, no argument you could lose. Liking something feels like discernment. In a room with no agreed standard, the strongest feeling wins. Usually that means the most senior person in the room, which is how good becomes whatever the boss responds to.

Everyone has taste. The trouble starts when taste is all there is. The campaign is made for someone outside the building, a person who will give it a second and a half of attention on a bad day. The eight people in the review will never be that person. Whether they personally like it is close to irrelevant, because they are not the audience and they never were.

The fix is to judge the work against the thing you agreed before anyone drew a line or wrote a word: the brief. Evaluation is a test against a standard you set in advance. Does it solve the problem in the brief? Is it for the person it is meant to reach, not the person reviewing it? Is it true to the strategy? Is it distinctive enough to get noticed? Will it survive contact with the real world, the small screen, the six-word version, the third viewing? Those questions have answers. “Do I like it” does not.

That single move, from “do I like it” to “will it do the job we agreed”, changes who holds the power in the room. It stops being the loudest feeling and starts being the brief. It also lets you separate two things that get tangled: “this is not to my taste” and “this will not work”. The first is about you. The second is about the work. Only the second is a note worth acting on. A good reviewer learns to say which one they are giving.

Measuring matters as much as judging, because you can evaluate hard and still evaluate the wrong thing. In 1985 Coca-Cola ran one of the most thorough evaluations in marketing history. Blind taste tests, surveys and focus groups all favoured the sweeter new formula, which beat both original Coke and Pepsi. The research was rigorous. It was also pointed at the wrong target. As the company's president Donald Keough later admitted, the tests “could not measure or reveal the deep and abiding emotional attachment” people felt for the original. New Coke launched on 23 April. Coca-Cola Classic was back on the shelves 79 days later. They judged the dog on sweetness and missed that people loved it for something else entirely.

The opposite discipline looks uncomfortable in the room. In 2018 Nike built a campaign around Colin Kaepernick, the most divisive athlete in America. The immediate response was boycotts, burning trainers and a wave of people saying, loudly, that they did not like it. Judged on whether it made everyone comfortable, it was indefensible. Judged on whether it would land with the young, diverse audience Nike wanted, it was exactly right. Online sales rose 31 per cent in the days after launch. The stock climbed around 18 per cent by the end of the year. It took the Grand Prix at Cannes. Nike did not ask whether the room liked it. They asked whether it would work on the people who were never in the room.

There is one more habit worth naming, because it does more damage than any single bad opinion. Faced with three routes, a room will often try to keep all three. The headline from the first, the image from the second, the ending from the third, glued into one. It feels generous. Nobody loses their idea. What you get is a Frankenstein, a thing with no spine, assembled by committee and loved by no one. Every strong idea has its own internal logic. Stitching three together breaks all three at once.

The way out is to change what you point at. When something in the work lands, resist naming the part. Name what it is doing. “Route two feels more confident, find me that here” gives a creative something to chase. “Use the blue from route two” just hands over a hex code and hopes. This is the same rule from the brief, arriving at the other end. You own the problem and the standard. They own the execution. A creative can solve “make it feel braver” in a dozen ways you would not have reached. They can only obey “move the logo left”. One invites their craft. The other kills it.

So before the next review, agree what you are marking against. Say it out loud. Write down what good looks like while the work is still being made. Do it before you have seen a thing, because a standard set after the fact is just taste with a clipboard. When the work arrives, ask what it has to do and whether it does it. Notice the difference between the drawing you would have made and the drawing that answers the brief. They are rarely the same. The brief is the one that pays the bills.

You can like the work or not. That was never the point. The dog on the table only has to be one thing: the one you asked for, doing the job you set. Judge it on that. You will back braver work, kill weaker work for the right reasons and stop losing good ideas to the person with the strongest feeling and the biggest office.

Get the brief right and you get the dog you wanted. Judge it right and you get to keep it.