Practice
5 min readHowtodecideachannelisfinished
Starting things is easy to get approved. Stopping them requires somebody to have been wrong.
Every marketing team we meet is running at least one thing nobody would start today. A social account maintained out of habit. A newsletter section that takes four hours a month and is read by nobody. A campaign type that made sense two strategies ago.
These survive not because anyone defends them, but because stopping requires an explicit decision and continuing does not.
Write the stop condition at the start
The cleanest fix is to decide the ending at the beginning. When a new channel or programme is approved, write down what would have to be true after two quarters for it to continue, and what result would mean it stops.
This costs nothing at the time and removes almost all of the awkwardness later. The decision to stop was made by everybody, in advance, when nobody was invested in the answer.
For the things already running
Ask a different question than the usual one. Not "is this producing anything?" — almost everything produces something — but "if this did not exist and someone proposed it today, with what we now know, would we approve it?"
That reframing tends to be decisive within about ten seconds per item, and it removes the need to prove that something failed. It only has to be a worse use of the hours than the alternative.
Then actually reclaim the time
The point of stopping is not the saved budget, which is usually modest. It is the attention. A small team running six programmes badly will beat itself running three properly, and the third one is where the durable work usually lives.
Stopping is the least celebrated skill in marketing and one of the most valuable. Nobody puts it in a case study, which is a reasonable summary of why the industry is bad at it.
If this describes a situation you are responsible for, a second opinion is the quickest way to find out how much of it applies. Ask us for one.
Keep reading
- Strategy7 min
The rented and the owned: a way to sort a marketing budget
Split the budget into what stops when you stop paying and what does not. The proportions tell you more about the business than any performance report.
- Content6 min
Your best content is already written. It is in the sales inbox.
The most useful pages on most websites are answers somebody already typed out once, to one customer, and then never published.