Kill it! Protecting the strategy from the best idea

The hardest thing I’ve had to do in this work is kill an idea that everyone in the room genuinely loved.

We had spent weeks on it. The creative was strong, the team was excited, the client was nodding along in every meeting. And I kept sitting with this uncomfortable feeling that we were solving the wrong problem.

The brand had a trust issue, not an awareness issue. And we had built something designed to make people feel good about them, which is exactly the wrong move when trust is what’s broken. It reads as deflection. People feel it even when they can’t name it.

Saying that out loud after three weeks of work, in a room full of people who were proud of what they built, is not a comfortable moment. But the alternative was running a campaign that was creatively solid and strategically wrong. In my experience that is worse than running nothing at all, because it costs more and still doesn’t move anything.

The role of a senior strategist isn't to find the best idea. It's to protect the strategy from the best idea when those two point in different directions.

That is a different skill, and honestly a harder one, because you have to be willing to be unpopular at exactly the moment everyone else has momentum.

Creative confidence isn’t about defending your work. It’s about knowing when the work needs to go, including your own.

Have you ever had to kill something you were proud of? What made you do it?

Originally published: LinkedIn, April 2026