Death By Committee — why so much healthcare marketing ends up interchangeable

The fastest way to kill a strong healthcare idea isn't rejection.

It's six words: "Let us take it away internally."

Nobody says no. Nobody argues with the idea in the room. It just goes quiet, gets passed around, and comes back three weeks later as something safer, rounder, and completely interchangeable with every other piece in the category. I've watched this happen for 20+ years on the production side, and it almost never looks like a decision. It looks like a process.

Here's how the idea actually dies.

The original point has no owner

A good idea usually starts as one clear thing. A single image. A patient who doesn't speak. A claim made plainly.

The moment it enters the chain — account, client, medical, legal, the second client who wasn't in the first meeting — it stops belonging to anyone. Everyone can comment. Nobody owns the intent. And when nobody owns the intent, every comment gets treated as equally valid, because there's no one in the room whose job is to protect the original point.

So the point gets negotiated. Not improved. Negotiated.

Work optimises for the most nervous person in the chain

Watch what survives a committee and what gets cut.

What gets cut is anything that made someone slightly uncomfortable — which is usually the exact thing that made the idea strong. What gets added is reassurance: another line, the logo bigger, a stat to back the feeling, a CTA so nobody can say there wasn't one.

By the end, the work isn't built to land with the audience. It's built so that no single person in the approval chain has to feel exposed. That's a different brief, and it produces a different — much blander — film.

The silence gets filled in

I experienced this less than a year ago. We had a client with a great concept and a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve with the production. The brief was meticulous. The storyboards were detailed and precise. The creative direction was approved, the look-and-feel signed off, and we were all set to go. I remember the first viewing — there were probably three people in the room. By the thirteenth viewing, there were probably nine or ten people in the room. Needless to say, we ended up with fourteen revisions, and a final product that was vastly different from the one I set out to create. At least it was safe.

The pattern is always the same. The idea depended on one brave, quiet choice. Committee can't sit with quiet. So the gaps get filled — sensibly, one addition at a time, each defensible on its own — until the thing that made it work has been politely buried under things that make it safe.

The cure isn't more meetings. It's a single owner.

You don't fix this with a better approval workflow. You fix it with a person.

One owner who carries the original intent all the way through — who can say "that note makes it safer and worse, and here's why" and has the standing to make it stick. Not a dictator. A custodian. Someone whose actual job is to refuse to let the point get negotiated away in the gaps between meetings.

That role is uncomfortable, because it means someone has to be accountable for the idea staying sharp. Committees exist partly so that nobody has to be. But interchangeable work is what you get when accountability is shared so widely it disappears.

The brands that hold their edge in healthcare aren't braver in the meeting. They've just decided, upfront, who gets to protect the point — and given that person the authority to do it.

If your last three pieces could be swapped between three different brands without anyone noticing, it's worth asking: in your process, who actually owns the idea once it leaves the room?