In most marketing and creative work, the real customer is not the consumer. It’s the approver.
This is the quiet truth that shapes campaigns far more than data, brand strategy, or customer insight. The approver—be it a marketing director, brand manager, or internal committee—controls whether work ever sees daylight. And because they are rarely measured by market performance, their primary job becomes self-preservation.
Approvers justify their role through interference. They “add value” by suggesting edits that align with their personal taste, internal politics, or corporate jargon. Risk is avoided not because it is wrong for the market, but because it might be wrong for their career. Distinctive work gets softened. Simple messaging gets cluttered. Anything unconventional gets buried under the weight of consensus.
And when the work inevitably underperforms, the blame rarely lands where it belongs. The client almost always points to the agency. The irony is that many agency people eventually cross over to the client side. You’d think they’d know better. They don’t. They commit the same sins—often with even greater zeal. The cycle repeats.
This is not a flaw in execution—it’s a structural flaw in incentives. Approvers are rewarded for being visible and “involved,” not for delivering measurable results. A campaign can underperform spectacularly, yet no one in the approval chain faces consequences. The blame shifts to the media budget, the market, or the creative agency, but never to the approval process itself.
For creatives, this creates a perverse reality. Your survival depends less on connecting with customers and more on navigating the tastes and insecurities of gatekeepers. The work is optimized for internal applause, not external impact. The intended audience becomes an afterthought.
The cost is enormous. Mediocrity is institutionalized. Bold ideas are strangled before they’re tested. And brands wonder why they are indistinguishable in the market.
The solution is not simply “better creative” but better accountability. Decision-makers must be tied to real-world performance. If they dilute or redirect work, they should own the market results. Without that, the creative process will remain a theatre of internal politics—brilliant ideas neutered to serve the selfish interest of the approver, while the real customer is left cold.
Until the industry corrects this misalignment, most marketing will keep solving the wrong problem for the wrong audience.