Why Feedback Is The Most Underrated Skill In Advertising

Every person above junior level in an agency gives feedback daily. Almost none of them were ever taught how, and the difference between a good note and a bad one decides whether work gets better or merely gets different.

The bad note is easy to recognise once you know the shape. It describes a preference without a reason, it arrives on the executed work rather than on the thinking, and it leaves the person receiving it with a change to make rather than a problem to solve.

What good feedback actually does

It names the problem and stops. The moment a note contains the solution, the work becomes the note-giver's, and the person who made it stops looking for anything better than what was just described to them.

This is the part that gets lost under time pressure. Naming a problem takes longer than describing a fix, and the fix feels more helpful. It is not. It is faster, which is a different thing, and it trains a department to wait for instructions.

Why agencies are structurally bad at it

Feedback in an agency arrives from too many directions at once, and most of it is unranked. A junior can receive notes from a creative director, an account lead, a strategist and a client in the same afternoon, with nothing indicating which one outranks the others when they conflict.

The skill nobody teaches is not giving feedback. It is triaging it: deciding which note is about the idea, which is about taste, and which is about a fear that has nothing to do with the work. Seniors do this silently and juniors are left to reverse-engineer it.

A note that cannot say what problem it is solving is not feedback. It is a preference wearing a lanyard.

The cheapest fix in the building

Say what you are reacting to before you say what you want changed. It costs one sentence.

Deloitte's India research puts hands-on learning at the centre of how this generation expects to grow, and in a creative department feedback is that learning. It is the mechanism. An agency that treats it as an interruption between meetings is not developing anyone, whatever the training budget says.