<div class="gn-article"><div class="gn-hero gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-hero__image"><img src="https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/687a235da6861294eec73166/6a02fe397cd5e6921a0e1600_entry-002-banner-69fc757cec2e1064456798.jpeg" alt=""></div> <div class="gn-hero__head"> <span class="gn-kicker"><span class="dot"></span>Expression</span> <h1 class="gn-title">The Secret Diary of a CMO Entry 011: “The Wrong Brief in the Right Suit”</h1> <div class="gn-meta"> <strong>The GO Network</strong> <span class="pip"></span> <span>6 May 2026</span> <span class="pip"></span> <span>4 min read</span> </div> </div> </div> <div class="gn-body"> <p class="gn-lede gn-reveal">This week I have interviewed three people for one role. A senior position on my team, brand-side, the kind of hire that will sit in board rooms within their first six months and influence how the next two years of work get shaped.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Two of the three candidates are agency-side, considering the move. The third is already brand-side, looking sideways. The candidate I want to write about today is the second of the agency-side ones. Six years at a respected London agency, sharp, prepared, well-presented. Senior lead.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">They had clearly rehearsed.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The opening was strong. They walked me through their last three big projects with confidence, named the right metrics, framed the impact in the language they thought I would respond to. They had read my company. They had read my team. They had read my career, somewhat alarmingly, including a podcast appearance from 2022 I had myself forgotten about.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Twenty minutes in, I asked the question I always ask. <em>"Tell me about a moment, in your last role, when the client made a decision you thought was wrong, and what you did."</em></p> <p class="gn-reveal">They told me a story about pushing back. About using data to challenge a brief. About convincing the client to abandon a direction in favour of one the agency believed in more strongly. The story was well-told. It was, on its own terms, a good story.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">It was also the wrong answer.</p> <aside class="gn-quote gn-reveal"><q>The gap between agency-side and brand-side is not a gap of skill. It is a gap of ground. What plays as bravery in an agency room reads as a warning sign across a brand-side table.</q><cite>The Secret CMO</cite></aside> <p class="gn-reveal">The candidate had rehearsed for the interview they thought I was running. They had not rehearsed for the interview I actually run.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">Agency-side people, when they consider going brand-side, often arrive with the wrong mental model of what brand-side actually values. They have spent years being told, by their own seniors, that the move requires strategic thinking, outside perspective, comfort with ambiguity, the agility of an agency mindset. All of that is true on the surface. None of it is what gets a candidate hired.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">What I am listening for, by the time we are forty minutes in, is something different. Whether the candidate can read a room of internal stakeholders. Whether they understand the difference between political and persuasive. Whether they have the patience to be overruled by someone with less expertise than them, and the maturity to make the same person look good the next week. Whether they describe their relationship with finance as adversarial or collaborative. Whether, when they tell a story about disagreement, the story ends with them having moved the organisation, or just with them having been right.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The candidate I interviewed this week was right, in the story they told. They were also alone in being right, by the end of it. The client did what the agency wanted. The campaign performed well. But the way they told the story, the framing of the win, the implicit hero of the narrative, was the agency, not the relationship.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I will not be hiring them.</p> <div class="gn-divider gn-reveal" aria-hidden="true"></div> <p class="gn-reveal">The other agency-side candidate, the third interview, told a very different story. She told me about a brief she had pushed against, internally and to the client, and lost. She had built the campaign anyway, against her own judgement, and the campaign had underperformed. She had then, in the post-mortem, defended the client's call publicly while privately working with her account team to make sure the next brief did not repeat the same pattern. She did not present the story as a win. She presented it as the kind of moment that taught her something specific about the limits of her own influence.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">That is the candidate I am thinking about hiring.</p> <h2 class="gn-reveal">The politics is the work</h2> <p class="gn-reveal">The point of writing this entry, for any agency reader thinking about going brand-side, is that the move is rarely about whether you have the skill. The skill is mostly transferable. The move is about whether you can adapt to a role where the politics is the work, not a distraction from the work.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">The strongest agency people I have hired into my team in the last decade have shared one thing. They were honest about their motivations. They wanted, genuinely, to operate inside the system rather than across it. They did not arrive talking about how the brand was being held back by its own internal complexity. They arrived asking how the complexity worked, and where the levers actually were.</p> <aside class="gn-callout gn-reveal"> <div class="gn-callout__label">What this means for you</div> <h4>What brand-side hiring managers are actually listening for.</h4> <ul> <li><strong>Can you read a room of internal stakeholders?</strong> Whether the candidate understands the difference between political and persuasive.</li> <li><strong>Can you be overruled with maturity?</strong> Whether they have the patience to be overruled by someone with less expertise than them, and the maturity to make the same person look good the next week.</li> <li><strong>Is your relationship with finance adversarial or collaborative?</strong> The framing of this relationship signals how you will operate inside the system.</li> <li><strong>Does your story end with you having moved the organisation, or just with you having been right?</strong> The implicit hero of the narrative matters as much as the outcome.</li> <li><strong>Are you honest about your motivations?</strong> They arrived asking how the complexity worked, and where the levers actually were.</li> </ul> </aside> <p class="gn-reveal">The candidate I will not be hiring will, I suspect, get an offer somewhere else within a quarter. They are talented. They will land. They might land brand-side, even, if the brand they land at values the agency story they tell more than the brand-side story they have not yet learned to tell.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">I will give them the honest feedback before the formal rejection lands. They might thank me. They might not. Either way, the next time they walk into a brand-side interview, they will be a better candidate for it. I owe them that, and I owe the version of myself that was once on the other side of that table the same.</p> <p class="gn-reveal">More soon.</p> <p class="gn-reveal"><strong>The Secret CMO</strong></p> </div></div>