Why We Told a Client to Cancel a $40,000 Video Three Days Before Launch

By Erez Menache, Founder and CEO of Crown

The video was three days from launch. Forty thousand dollars of production, a script everyone loved, and a founder who had already played the first cut for his board. Then we told him to cancel it.

Not trim it. Not move the date. Cancel it, put it in a drawer, do not launch.

We had been living in this B2B software company's numbers for weeks, and traffic was never the problem. The problem was what happened after someone signed up. Most people who created an account never reached the part of the product that would have made them want it. They arrived, looked around, and left. The video was about to send a great many more of them into that same room.

So he had two options. He could launch, hit every view target, celebrate a big number on a slide, and change nothing about the business. Or he could stop, fix what people were walking away from, and spend the same money later on a product that could hold the attention it bought.

We said it plainly, and the room went quiet. A forty thousand dollar decision reversed in two sentences. Cancelling that video took a large line item off our own invoice that quarter.

I should be honest about what that does and does not cost us, because "we turned down money" is the easiest thing in the world to say and the hardest to mean. We lose the line item in the quarter. We keep the client for years, and only if the company actually grows. That is not nobility, it is the design. We built the model that way precisely so that the expensive advice and the correct advice would point in the same direction. When a firm is paid per deliverable, those two things regularly point in opposite directions, and the client is the one who pays for the gap.

He did not take it as us walking away from work. The video was shelved, the sign-up experience was rebuilt first, and the same cut launched two months later into something that finally held.

Told this way it is still too clean. We did not know it would work. The rebuild could have taken twice as long, or fixed nothing, and we would have spent two months of a client's runway to arrive back where we started. Not every founder takes that call either. Some hear it, thank us, and launch anyway, and then we are the ones sitting in the room watching a good campaign land on a broken floor. This one happened to end well. The decision would have been the same if it had not.

Six Vendors And No Owner

Someone will read all that and say it was a product problem, not a marketing problem, and that a marketing firm had no business touching it.

That distinction is the most expensive idea in early-stage companies.

The buyer does not experience a product department and a marketing department. They experience one continuous thing: an ad, a page, a sign-up, a first ten minutes. Whoever is responsible for whether that whole sequence works is responsible for the result. Split it into slices and the slices will each be defended while the sequence quietly fails.

Which is what we see in company after company. There is a branding agency. An advertising agency. A freelancer for design, another for video, someone for search, a public relations contact. Six or seven people, each genuinely good at their slice. And the marketing still is not working.

The instinct is to add. Another agency for the gap. A senior hire. Every addition brings one more voice to the table and takes a little more clarity off it. The problem was never a missing skill. It is a missing owner.

Ask that arrangement one simple question, is the business getting more customers and why, and you get six partial answers. The branding agency talks about awareness. The advertising agency talks about what it costs to get a click. The search consultant talks about rankings. Every one of those answers is true, and not one of them is the answer.

So the founder ends up responsible by default. That is the founder at eleven at night, holding a presentation from one agency next to a dashboard from another that tells a different story, translating between people who have never spoken to each other. That is not a marketing department. That is a founder doing the job of a marketing leader they never hired, badly, in hours they do not have.

We have started calling the distance between those two things the ownership gap: how many people touch your marketing, against how many are accountable for what it produces. In most young companies the second number is zero.

Closing It

Closing that gap is not a matter of finding a better specialist. It comes down to whether anyone is accountable for the whole sequence rather than a piece of it, and whether that person's own outcome depends on the honest answer to "is this working."

That is the only reason we could tell him to cancel the video. Someone paid to produce a video has a reason to produce the video. Someone whose success is measured by whether the company is bigger next year has a reason to wait. Founders feel that difference across the table long before they can name it.

The video was never really the decision. Who owned the outcome was.

Erez Menache is the founder and CEO of Crown, a global marketing partner for technology companies, taking ownership of a company's marketing function from strategy through execution under one team and one contract. More at Crown.