The Campaign Autopsy: LIVE

The Campaign Autopsy: Live

A £250,000 leadership programme. Six months of development. Senior buy-in. A snazzy name. An intro video from someone in the C-suite.

The result? Two sign-up (and one was Dave from Finance, who clicks on literally everything).

In this episode, I do something I'd normally charge a client for...I conduct a full campaign autopsy on a fictional (but painfully realistic) learning programme that died three days after launch. Not because the product was bad. The product was brilliant. It died because nobody marketed it.

I walk through five causes of death that I see killing campaigns in every organisation I work with: comms that talk to L&D instead of the audience, a total absence of the What's In It For Me, designs that look like they were made during a fire drill, the classic launch-and-vanish, and the Field of Dreams fallacy that convinces us people will engage just because something exists.

There's a before-and-after email teardown that'll make you wince (and then immediately want to rewrite every piece of comms you've ever sent). There's a Netflix comparison that shows just how far behind internal campaigns are when it comes to personalisation.

If you've ever launched something you were genuinely proud of and watched it sink without trace, this one's for you. It's not comfortable. But it's fixable. And that's the whole point.

Want the full playbook? 100 Internal Marketing Hacks — 128 pages of battle-tested strategies to stop your campaigns being ignored, forgotten, or eye-roll material.