I once sat in a meeting that lasted two hours. There were eight people in the room. The purpose was to "align on the digital content strategy for Q3." We had a deck. We had a facilitator. We had post-it notes in four colours representing different audience segments. We had a whiteboard divided into quadrants. We had strong opinions and weak coffee.
By the end of the two hours, we had agreed that we needed another meeting to finalise the approach. The facilitator would send around a summary. The strategist (me) would refine the framework. The creative team would start thinking about executions. The account team would update the client. The timeline was "aggressive but achievable." Everyone left feeling productive. Nothing had been produced.
This is how advertising works. Not always, not every agency, but fundamentally and structurally -- advertising is an industry that talks about things rather than makes things. The meetings are about things. The decks are about things. The strategies are about things. The things themselves exist somewhere in the future, separated from the conversations about them by weeks or months of process, alignment, approval, and revision.
The meeting industrial complex
I don't want to romanticise what I'm saying here or pretend the meetings were pointless. Some of them genuinely were, but many served a real function: getting smart people aligned on a problem before committing resources to a solution. In a world where building something took months and cost hundreds of thousands of pounds, you needed alignment. The cost of building the wrong thing was catastrophic. So you met. You discussed. You aligned. You de-risked.
The problem is that the world changed and the meetings didn't. Building something no longer takes months. It doesn't cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. I can build a working prototype of a content strategy tool in an afternoon. The cost of building the wrong thing is now lower than the cost of the meeting to decide whether to build it. But the meeting still happens. The deck still gets made. The alignment still takes three rounds. Because that's how the process works, and the process outlives the conditions that created it.
What if you just built the thing?
Here's the thought experiment I keep running. Take any strategy meeting I sat in over fifteen years and ask: what if, instead of discussing the approach, someone had just built a version of it? Not a final version. Not a polished version. A rough, working version that we could react to instead of theorise about.
The two-hour content strategy meeting? What if the strategist had built a simple content hub overnight -- populated with sample posts, organised by audience segment, with the tone and visual identity already visible? Instead of debating whether the content should feel "editorial" or "native," everyone could look at it and respond. "This feels right." "This is too corporate." "This section should be more prominent." Concrete reactions to a concrete thing, not abstract opinions about abstract concepts.
The brand positioning workshop? What if someone had built three landing pages, each expressing a different positioning, and put them in front of people to see which one they responded to? Instead of spending a day with sticky notes debating the difference between "premium" and "elevated," you could see the difference and choose.
The innovation brainstorm? What if someone had built three rough products overnight and brought them to the meeting? Instead of generating ideas on a whiteboard, you could evaluate things that already existed. "This one has potential. This one doesn't work. This one needs a different audience." Real feedback on real things, not enthusiastic notes on hypothetical ones.
The transition
The shift from "let's discuss" to "let me show you" is the single biggest change in how I work now. And it's not just more efficient -- it produces better outcomes. Because here's what I've learned: people don't know what they want until they see it. You can spend hours in a meeting debating the perfect approach, and the moment someone sees an actual version, everything changes. The conversation becomes specific. The feedback becomes useful. The decisions become real.
This was always true, but the cost of making something visible used to be prohibitive. You needed designers and developers and time and budget. So you talked instead. You wrote briefs and built decks and created frameworks, all as proxies for the thing itself. The deck was never the thing. The deck was a description of the thing. And descriptions, no matter how well-crafted, lose information. They lose tone, feeling, proportion, experience -- all the qualities that only become apparent when the thing exists.
Now the thing can exist almost as quickly as the description of the thing. And when it does, the conversation that follows is immeasurably better. More focused. More honest. More productive. Because everyone is reacting to reality instead of imagining possibility.
The advertising industry runs on talking
I say this with love and fifteen years of experience: the advertising industry's primary output is conversation. Meetings, brainstorms, tissue sessions, chemistry sessions, alignment sessions, wash-up sessions. The amount of talking that happens before anything gets made is extraordinary. And much of it is genuinely valuable -- the thinking that precedes the making is what separates good work from arbitrary work.
But there's a point where the talking becomes its own justification. Where meetings exist because meetings are what the agency does, not because the meeting is the best way to solve the problem at hand. Where the process has become the product. Where alignment has become an end in itself rather than a means to an end.
The product world operates differently. Not perfectly -- product teams have their own meeting pathologies -- but differently. The bias is toward building. Toward prototyping. Toward shipping something imperfect and iterating based on real feedback rather than hypothetical alignment. The product world understood something that advertising is still learning: the fastest way to know if something works is to build it and see.
Let me show you
The transition from advertising to building products wasn't a career change. It was a shift in verb. From "let's discuss" to "let me show you." From "here's the strategy" to "here's the thing the strategy would produce." From describing the experience to creating the experience.
Every product I've built could have been a meeting. Taste OS could have been a deck about scoring brand culture. CultureTerminal could have been a strategy framework for tracking trends. Modern Retro could have been a mood board in a pitch about brand nostalgia. Little London could have been a content strategy for a parenting brand. In the agency world, these ideas would have lived and died in PowerPoint. Outside the agency world, they live on the internet. With URLs. That people use.
I'm not saying meetings are useless. I'm saying the ratio is off. Too much discussion, not enough demonstration. Too much alignment, not enough action. Too many meetings that should have been products.
The next time you're in a meeting about something that could be built, ask yourself: how long would it take to just build a version? If the answer is "less time than this meeting," you have your answer.
Close the deck. Open the tool. Build the thing.
