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Workweek Newsletter {beacon} {ww_hashed_user = md5(email)}

Daniel Murray

Oct 29th, 2026

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Hi Marketing Bestie,

Going to Vegas next week. I’m already overwhelmed I think.

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5 Ways to Break Out of the Optimization Trap

There's a strange thing happening in marketing. We have more data, better technology, and more ways to reach customers than ever before. Yet walk through enough websites, scroll past enough ads, or look at a few recent rebrands, and you start noticing something.

A lot of it looks the same.

Anthony Reeves has a theory about why. He's led creative teams at Amazon, held a global brand and creative leadership role at Kohler, and worked across WPP and LVMH. He's also the author of Eat the Donkey: Why Great Companies Embrace Discomfort.

He believes we've become so focused on removing friction and optimizing performance that we're losing some of the things that make marketing effective in the first place. The disagreements that lead to better ideas. The experiments that don't have a guaranteed outcome. The creative decisions that might not make perfect sense in a spreadsheet.

And maybe a little discomfort is exactly what some brands need.

Listen to the full episode here where Anthony breaks down why he'd experiment with 10 to 15% of a marketing budget, how AI could make brands even more alike, and why one Ford campaign spent three months getting approved.

1️⃣. You Can't Optimize Your Way To Your Next Big Idea.

Anthony's Take: "You can't grow through optimization."

There's nothing wrong with improving a campaign that's already working. Better targeting, stronger conversion rates, lower acquisition costs. Those improvements add up, and Anthony isn't suggesting you stop making them.

His concern is what happens when optimization becomes the entire strategy.

If your marketing plan consists of doing last quarter's activities a little more efficiently, where does the next big opportunity come from? You might get better at reaching the same customers with the same message, but that doesn't necessarily help you discover a new audience, channel, or reason for someone to buy.

Anthony recommends putting 10 to 15% of your budget toward experiments. Not just another headline variation, but different content, media, and platforms that give you a chance to learn something you didn't already know.

The interesting part is that he sees the uncertainty as a good thing. If you already know exactly how something will perform, you're probably not learning very much.

Takeaway: Set aside 10 to 15% of next quarter's budget for experiments outside your usual playbook.

Give each 1 a hypothesis, success metric, and deadline. Keep optimizing what works, but make sure some of your budget is going toward finding what works next.

2️⃣. Your Biggest Competitor Might Be Your Own Data.

Anthony's Take: "The tools you have are the same tools that competing brands and companies actually have."

Anthony brought up an example I hadn't thought about before. During the soccer World Cup, he noticed how similar the cleats from Nike, Adidas, and Puma looked. Different companies, different brands, but remarkably similar products.

His explanation was that they were all optimizing around similar data. And when everyone is trying to solve the same problem with the same information, it's not surprising when they arrive at similar answers.

Now think about what happens when competing marketing teams use the same AI models, similar customer data, and the same optimization strategies. The technology might help everyone produce better-performing work, but what happens to the things that make each brand recognizable?

Anthony pointed to McLaren's recent logo redesign as another example. A brand with decades of racing heritage ends up with a minimalist identity that, in his view, looks like it belongs alongside a dozen luxury fashion brands.

I happen to be a McLaren fan, so this one hurt a little. But I understood his point. There's a difference between making something more modern and removing the personality that made people care about it.

Takeaway: Remove your logo from your last 5 campaigns and put them next to your competitors' work. Could someone tell which brand created which campaign?

If not, look for something distinctive in your messaging, visual identity, or creative approach that you can make unmistakably yours.

3️⃣. Nike Was Never Really In The Shoe Business.

Anthony's Take: "Nike was not ever in the business of selling shoes or selling T-shirts. They were in the business of motivation."

1 of my favorite questions to ask about a brand is what it's actually selling. Not the product someone puts in their shopping cart, but the reason they wanted it in the first place.

Anthony uses Nike to explain the difference.

Nike built its identity around motivation. It was the brand that made you want to wake up at 5:30 in the morning and go for a run, even when it was raining. The shoes mattered, obviously, but the feeling behind them mattered just as much.

Look at the "Dream Crazy" campaign with Colin Kaepernick. It wasn't a product demonstration or a list of features. It was a statement about what the brand believed, and it gave people something to connect with beyond the product itself.

Anthony argues that Nike started losing some of that clarity when it shifted toward faster fashion and changed its retail strategy. Meanwhile, competitors like On and New Balance found opportunities to grow.

The bigger lesson isn't that every brand needs some grand mission statement. It's that knowing what people actually come to you for makes it easier to decide which ideas belong to your brand and which ones don't.

Takeaway: Finish this sentence: "We're in the business of _____."

The answer can't be your product category. Then review your last 3 campaigns and ask whether they communicate that bigger idea or simply explain what you're selling.

4️⃣. A 100-Page Creative Brief Is A Cry For Help.

Anthony's Take: "A creative brief should be brief."

I've seen creative briefs that contain so much research, audience information, and supporting data that you almost need another brief to explain the original one.

Anthony's approach is much simpler. He wants the analyst to do the hard work of sorting through the information and come back with two or three insights that might actually lead somewhere.

He shared an example from a home security campaign. The team discovered that people were spending more time away from their homes than inside them. That one observation gave the creative team a direction: What if you could be home even when you weren't?

Another campaign, this time for Verizon, focused on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. The media team recognized that it was a major travel day, which gave the creative team a specific moment and customer behavior to build around.

Neither example required the creative team to solve fifteen different problems at once.

And that's what I find interesting about simplicity. Getting to one good idea often requires looking at a hundred possible directions and deciding that ninety-nine of them aren't worth pursuing. The work is in making those decisions before the brief reaches the creative team.

Takeaway: Ask your analyst for the 2 or 3 most useful customer insights, then choose the 1 that best explains the problem you're trying to solve.

Build a 1-page brief around that problem, the audience, and the message. Give the creative team enough direction to be inventive without asking them to solve everything.

5️⃣. 3 Months Of Approvals. 1 Watered-Down Idea.

Anthony's Take: "The good friction will make things better. The bad friction will slow things down."

Early in his career in the US, Anthony worked on a campaign for Ford's F-150. His team came up with an idea they liked, showed it to their creative director, who showed it to the executive creative director, who showed it to the chief creative officer.

Then the idea made its way back down the same chain.

By the time the process was over, roughly 3 months had passed and the work had changed seven or eight times.

I told Anthony it sounded like a game of telephone. Someone has an idea, explains it to someone else, who explains it to another person, and eventually the person making the decision is hearing a version of the idea that's missing half the original thinking.

Anthony believes the people who create the work should be the ones presenting it. Even if they're junior. Even if they're nervous. They understand why they made the decisions they made, and giving them that opportunity builds confidence and trust.

He also talked about how Amazon handles disagreement. People are expected to challenge ideas during the meeting, make a decision, and commit to that decision afterward. The friction happens while it can still improve the work, rather than in hallway conversations after everyone has supposedly agreed.

There's a big difference between a difficult conversation that makes an idea better and an approval process that simply makes it older.

Takeaway: Count the approval layers between your creative team and the final decision-maker. See if you can remove one, and let the people who created the work present it themselves. Encourage disagreement before the decision is made, but don't keep reopening it afterward.

WORKWEEK