Every agency judges every other agency’s work. It’s ritual sport. Lazy execution, they say. Derivative. Poor craft. But what you’re seeing isn’t the agency’s idea. It’s what survived eight rounds of approvals, three rebriefs, and the gravitational pull of committee thinking. Original concepts decay exponentially through approval chains—not linearly, exponentially. By layer eight, you’re judging 13% of what was pitched. The other 87% died in meetings you weren’t in, killed by stakeholders you’ve never met. The theatre of judgment is easy when you don’t know you’re mocking a survivor.
In 2012, TBWA\Chiat\Day launched a campaign for Gatorade that industry peers immediately savaged online. “Lazy execution.” “Derivative.” “We would never ship this.” Six months later, a creative director from one of the loudest critics left his agency. On his way out, he admitted to a colleague that the Gatorade team had presented him the exact same concept two years earlier. His client killed it in the third round of approvals. By the time TBWA’s version reached the world, it had survived what his hadn’t: the gauntlet of compromise. The critics were mocking a survivor, not a failure.
There’s an unspoken sport in agency land. Agencies judging other agencies.
Every new campaign launch becomes an open buffet for critique. The knives come out. The DMs light up. Everyone circles, certain they’d have done it better.
I was curious how much of what we see actually reflects the agency’s original thinking. So I talked to a lot of people who’ve been in those rooms, and I, too, have been in those rooms - many times over.
What Survived the Meetings
The final campaign you see is a ghost of its original pitch. A mangled survivor of approvals, rebriefs, risk-averse committees, procurement notes, and client-side politics.
By the time it meets the world, it has gone through more revisions than a constitutional draft.
If you think what you’re seeing is a pure reflection of an agency’s thinking, you’re wrong. The split isn’t 50-50. It’s closer to 30% agency, 70% client. And that’s being generous to the agency.
Every approval layer sands off a corner. Every manager, director, or stakeholder reshapes it to their taste until the collective mediocrity of compromise takes over.
The bold idea that won the pitch gets softened in legal. The emotional truth gets diluted by research. The distinctive voice gets averaged across three regional markets and four demographic segments.
What you’re judging is not the idea. It’s what the idea became after survival.
The Ritual of Ego
Yet when the ad drops, other agencies act like vultures waiting outside the premiere, ready to feast on the carcass of what once was a brave idea.
It’s theatre. A ritual of ego disguised as insight.
The irony is that the same critics will face the same dilution the moment their turn comes. Their bold pitch will meet the same death by meeting. Their distinctive concept will get the same notes: “Make it clearer.” “Tone it down.” “Can we test this first?”
The cycle repeats. The judgment continues. The self-awareness never arrives.
The Mathematics of Dilution
I started mapping how ideas decay through approval chains. The pattern behaves like radioactive decay. Not linear erosion, but exponential collapse. (I can’t help myself with equations. Skip this if you want. But if you’re curious, the math actually explains why the decay compounds so brutally.)
The equation is simple:
I(n) = I₀ × e^(-λn)
Where:
I₀ = Original idea integrity (100%)
n = Number of approval layers
λ = Compromise coefficient (risk aversion × political weight)
I(n) = What survives
If your compromise coefficient is 0.3 and you go through 5 approval layers, you retain roughly 22% of the original concept. The other 78% got smoothed, softened, and committee-approved into irrelevance.
Most campaigns go through 7 to 12 layers. Do the math. By approval layer eight with a modest λ of 0.25, you’re at 13.5% of what you pitched.
What you’re judging isn’t the agency’s thinking. You’re judging the 13%.
Commerce Is Negotiation
We forget that creativity inside commerce is not art. It’s negotiation. It’s a game of survival where the original idea is the first casualty.
Every brilliant campaign that made it through did so because someone fought hard enough, or the client was brave enough, or the timing was lucky enough. Not because the idea was perfect, but because it survived.
The campaigns we mock often died slower deaths than ours did. They just had the misfortune of making it to daylight instead of being killed in round two.
So before you mock another agency’s final output, remember: you’re not looking at their idea.
You’re looking at the sum of compromises that made it to daylight.
And that daylight burns everything equally.
The next time you see a campaign and think “we would have done it better,” ask yourself: would your version have survived? Would it have made it through legal, through research, through the VP who hates that color, through the stakeholder who needs their logo bigger?
Or would it have died in round three, unmocked but also unseen, while something else took the heat?
The theatre of judgment is easy when you’re in the audience. It’s harder when you realize the stage is waiting for you too.