Stop Doing It Because That's How It's Always Been Done: A Conversation with Marianne Kaiser

Some people spend a career learning how an industry works. Marianne Kaiser spent hers learning why it works the way it does, and what needs to change. Nearly two decades in creative and advertising, much of it in healthcare, taught her to take complicated science and turn it into work people can actually understand. Then she went from art intern to EVP inside the biggest agency structures, and decided to build the opposite of all of it around one question: how much of the agency model is actually necessary?

Her answer is Contrary Collective, senior-led teams, less process, and a simple refusal to do things because that's how they've always been done. The phrase she keeps coming back to is process theater, and once you hear it, you start seeing it everywhere.

The process everybody pretends is necessary

The biggest offender, in her world, is concept development. The initial concepting phase in advertising can drag on for weeks, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and meeting after meeting where layers of people break down the same ideas. When she says concept, she means the metaphorical picture of what a brand will look like, and too often it lands somewhere cheesy: the family on the beach, the sun shining, the dog. Nobody wants to see that anymore, yet the machine spends real money getting there. What she watches happen internally is siloing. Creatives feel a deep ownership and won't let other departments in, and that ownership costs time, resources, and revenue that never needed to be lost. The more collaborative the team, the faster the decisions, and it doesn't make the work less creative. It just means everyone is putting their best effort in together.

When the glass broke

She didn't lose faith in the machine in one moment; it eroded. The first crack came four or five years into her career, as print went digital. Old presses needed color breaks, a sheet listing the exact colors making up a document and where each appeared. Sending to a digital press, the computer figures all of that out for you, so she skipped the step. The studio sent it back, and she got a talking-to about not following process. Her reaction was not her finest, a yelling fight in the middle of the creative department, because it was a waste of time and the client's money on something nobody would ever look at. Once that glass was broken, she kept seeing more of it. Why are we selling clients block-and-tackle tactics that don't fit them? She kept moving to smaller agencies hoping it would be better, and it would be, until each one grew and the same theater returned. Eventually the tipping point was simple: I don't want to do this anymore.

Regulation does not make bad work, it reveals it

Pharma, oncology, rare disease, women's health. Regulation, she argues, doesn't make the creative worse so much as expose weak creatives fast, because you cannot lean on tropes or jargon with a regulatory team. Everything has to be based in fact, every claim referenced, and hyperbole is simply not allowed. Where regulation does hurt is upstream of the agency: some of the language the government requires in an ad, meant to be fair to the patient, can end up confusing the patient more, and that's a barrier the industry hasn't solved.

The deeper reason healthcare moves at a glacier's pace is that it's an old industry built around patient safety, not around doing the next new thing. You don't change fast when changing fast can put people at risk, and the industry is still rebuilding trust it broke long ago, back to research done on people who never consented. So it crawls, carefully, and then someone inevitably comes in and messes it up. As she put it, this is why we can't have nice things.

The patient behind the creative

She was a patient before she was a healthcare creative, and that cuts both ways. It makes her more empathetic, always trying to stand in the patient's shoes, though after twenty years of speaking the language she sometimes forgets what it's like for someone hearing it fresh. It also makes her angrier at the machinery around the medicine, the insurance hoops, Medicare, Medicaid, the ins and outs that stand between an exciting new product and the patients who deserve it. The treatment can be genuinely good and still get strangled by everything a patient has to jump through to reach it.

One question that exposes process theater

If a founder or brand lead can't tell rigor from theater, she has a first question: is the team pitching me the team I'll actually see on the calls going forward? And who else will show up? She has heard from clients, more than once in the last two years, that they were shocked to find fifteen people on a call for an email. Sometimes that's real, and it's exactly where theater lives. You want the people doing the work to understand the nuance, but you do not need fifteen of them to get there. Are they each doing something unique, or is it overlap? The fix is to lean on senior people and to trust that your staff are adults who can sit in a meeting and do their job afterward without a manager in the room.

Fit over availability, and a healthy bench

Staffing by fit rather than availability means turning down work that isn't in the wheelhouse, and she's fine with that, because it keeps the team focused on what they're genuinely good at. The operational cost lands elsewhere: you have to keep a healthy bench. That means staying in real contact with the people you like, keeping them well compensated, paying them on time, and giving them guidance when they need it. Scaling that discipline is the thing she's actively solving, precisely so Contrary never becomes the agency grabbing anybody off the street to work on a client's brand.

What the small end of the market teaches

Thimble, fixed scope and fixed price for small businesses, is the opposite constraint from a pharma launch, and it taught her something the regulated world never could. Big pharma comes with bureaucracy and a lot of people on the client side, so approving a brand in two rounds of revisions is unheard of. A small business owner with drive who knows what they want can get through an entire website with you fast. Contrary recently ran one of those simple packages where the client was crystal clear in onboarding about what she wanted and who her audience was, and they delivered at a speed a behemoth could never match. Right-fit clients don't waste your time because they don't want theirs wasted either. The ones to avoid are the ones who have to see it to know it, because that's where projects spiral.

Keep the camaraderie, kill the overhead

Building the opposite of the big-agency model does not mean throwing away what it taught her. The biggest agencies taught camaraderie, small teams banding together inside a $12 million brand, learning to communicate and, only half joking, to treat the client as the common enemy. The steps those agencies follow aren't wrong in themselves. What's wrong is the number of people thrown at each task and the number of approvals every idea has to survive. The smaller agencies taught her the rest: how to build culture, keep clients happy, and position an offering when you can't win on the strength of a famous name.

People who don't stop at the first answer

She hires for pushback, and she has the receipt. A client in the care space came in building an app and handed over messaging someone else had written, telling the team to just use it. The team read it and realized it didn't fit what the client had actually been saying. One person kept digging, pulled statistics, assembled the supporting data, and went back with a different positioning and audience. The client returned and admitted they hadn't seen it themselves, and loved the new direction. We're not order takers, she says, and nobody benefits from yes-men. The people she picks ask questions and push, and she takes real pride in that.

Coaching from the racetrack

Coaching drivers at the track changed how she manages creatives, who she'll happily admit, with love, are prickly people. The track's first rule is to meet your student where they are. The second is to run a couple of laps and then pick one thing to work on, because throwing everything at someone at once is overload and they freeze. She brought both into the studio. Instead of telling people what to do, she asks questions and gathers feedback, and when someone arrives with a complaint she asks a clarifying question first: do you want me to coach you through this, or do you want an answer? Complaining is allowed, but nothing changes until you can name what you're actually trying to solve.

The assumption she had to kill

The founder assumption she had to give up was that she knew what she was building. The end points of her dreams haven't changed, but the order has. She wanted a big creative community with free learning sessions, and still refuses on principle to charge creatives to learn, because she believes you learn by doing. You can read a hundred books about driving race cars and still not know how until you're behind the wheel. But community doesn't exist without revenue, so she made peace with building the client business first. The Slack and the community calls are running; they're just not yet what she wants them to be. She's a zero-to-100 person who wants the good stuff immediately and is bad at patience, which she notes is a defining trait of most founders.

What she hopes disappears

If Contrary gets wildly successful, two things she'd love to see die with the old model are silos and timesheets. Silos are really about culture, and success would mean a completely different one. Timesheets are about how people are valued. Her hope is one of two futures: salaried people who aren't expected to grind a bazillion hours, or people who work part time and are paid for exactly the hours they work. At big agencies chasing profit for a board, people get squeezed into 50 and 60 hour weeks at the same salary, the resentment builds, and the work starts to feel hollow. The reason her team shows up with passion, she says, is that they feel valued, and the mechanism for that is simple: paying them for all the hours they actually work.

The thing we'll look back on

Ask her what someone in healthcare advertising will look back on in twenty years and wince at, and the answer is concepting again. We still evaluate concepts as flat, static frames, an 11 by 17 board or a 16 by 9 slide, then run a photo shoot to recreate the same flat image. What is it all for? Her clients who are open to it don't want to look like everyone else, so Contrary is experimenting with a different path: bring the cost of concepting down so clients can actually play with it, or plan from the start for how the work will live, instead of defaulting to the format it happened to have when she started in advertising.

Key takeaways

Process theater is the work nobody questions. Concepting that eats weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars, fifteen people on a call for an email. Ask whether each step and each person is actually doing something unique.

Regulation exposes weak creatives, it doesn't create them. You can't hide behind tropes or jargon when every claim must be referenced. Facts, not hyperbole.

Ask who you'll actually work with. The team in the pitch should be the team on the calls. Lean on senior people and trust that your staff are adults.

Fit over availability, backed by a healthy bench. Turn down what isn't your wheelhouse, and keep your bench well paid, paid on time, and guided, so you never grab anyone off the street.

People come with passion when they feel valued. Kill the silos and the squeeze. Pay people for the hours they actually work.

Frameworks worth stealing

Coach one lap at a time

Borrowed straight from the racetrack. Meet the person where they are, then have them run a couple of laps and pick a single thing to improve, because piling on every note at once causes overload and they stop knowing where to focus. Manage by questions rather than instructions, and when someone brings a complaint, ask first whether they want to be coached through it or just want an answer, so they have to name the real problem before anything can change.

The pitch-team question

Before you hire an agency, ask two things: is the team in this room the team I'll see on the calls going forward, and who else will be on those calls? Then look at how many people touch a routine deliverable. If a simple email needs fifteen people, that's not rigor, it's theater. Rigor is a small number of senior people each doing something genuinely distinct.

Quotes worth keeping

The lines I wrote down.

Stop doing things because that's how it's always been done.

Why do you need 15 people on a call for an email?

I don't want to charge creatives for learning. Work should help you learn.

Rapid fire round

Same questions every guest. Quick questions, quick answers.

Best advice you've ever received? Wear life like a loose garment. Close cousin to be like water: don't hold on too tight. People grip hard out of fear and a desire for control, all the limiting beliefs that say you have to be the only one who can do it. You usually aren't.

Advice you took and wish you'd ignored? That she needed to look more creative. She dresses plainly, jeans and black tees and a blazer, and spent years cosplaying creativity to be taken seriously, until it broke and she realized nobody cares. The fix wasn't the wardrobe, it was landing at a company where creative was valued as part of leadership.

What would you tell your younger self? Get out of agency life earlier. Fear and the need for control kept her in it. Waiting meant she finally went out on her own with a two-year-old at home, which was, in her words, insane.

Ongoing challenge that keeps you up at night? Pipeline. She's not a trained salesperson, and inside big agencies the clients hunt you down. Outside, it's inverted.

Favorite spot? New York, which her husband says she treats like the one that got away. Specifically the food carts, deeply underrated, right down to a Mister Softee served from a truck.

Tool you can't live without? A physical calculator with real keys. It's satisfying, and she can actually see what she's doing instead of clicking back and forth on a screen.

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Marianne Kaiser is the founder of Contrary Collective, which builds senior-led creative teams for regulated and small-business clients, after nearly two decades in advertising that took her from art intern to EVP. Find her on LinkedIn and at bequitecontrary.com.