A strategist started at a shop two blocks from mine the Tuesday after Labor Day, and by Thursday she had bought me a coffee at Ovation to ask a question she had already decided the answer to. She wanted to know how long it takes before they let you pick.
Pick the idea. Pick the direction. Pick, in her words, the good one.
She had a board of references on her phone and it was, genuinely, better than anything I put together in my first two years. Her eye is real. That is not the polite thing to say, it is the accurate thing.
It is also not what anybody is paying her for.
Taste is the ticket that gets you into the room. Listening is the whole job once you are inside it.
I spent my agency years believing the opposite, and I want to be specific about what it cost. I would come out of a client interview with a point of view already assembled, and I would spend the next two weeks defending it instead of testing it. The work was sharp. The work was also frequently about a problem the client did not have.
What I missed was the sentence at minute forty. It is always around minute forty. The founder stops performing the founder story, gets bored of her own language, and says the true thing sideways. We keep losing people between the second and third order. Our best salesperson does not use the deck. Nobody here can explain what we charge for.
That sentence is the assignment. You cannot taste your way to it. You can only be quiet long enough to hear it and disciplined enough to write it down verbatim, without improving it.
The three years my new friend is about to spend will teach her this by attrition. She will present something beautiful and watch it die. She will present something plain that quotes the client back to themselves and watch a room of executives nod at their own words like they are hearing scripture. Eventually she will notice which one shipped.
The strategists I trust now are not the ones with the best references. They are the ones who take notes nobody asked for, who remember what the CFO said in passing eight weeks ago, who can tell you which stakeholder is quietly the veto. Patagonia did not get where it is on art direction. It got there because somebody kept listening to what the company actually did and refused to let the marketing drift away from it.
You cannot taste your way to it.
I told her about half of this and then let her get to her ten o'clock. It was raining by the time I walked home, the first real Portland rain since June, and Truffles was in the window looking personally betrayed by it.