Teardown: A Campaign Brief Stuck in Lead-Gen Theatre
Objective: Read a real-looking campaign brief and flag the specific defects that reveal lead-gen theatre, gating educational content and treating every download like a sales-ready lead, versus the tactics that are actually fine.
A junior marketer at Stitch Fix drafted this Q3 campaign brief for review. It reads confidently, but three choices in it will inflate cost per lead and burn trust with early-stage readers.
Find the defects, explain why each one matters, and don't flag the two tactics in the brief that are actually sound.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Free, easy to comment inline next to the brief text
The process
Specimens to review
This brief will hit its 2,000-MQL target on paper. Identify what's actually broken about the strategy behind it.
Q3 CAMPAIGN BRIEF — Stitch Fix Style Discovery Guide Goal: Grow qualified leads. Tactic 1: Publish 'How to Build a Capsule Wardrobe,' a beginner styling guide. Gate it behind a mandatory form (name, email, phone number) before any of the content is visible. Tactic 2: Promote the gated guide via paid social with the CTA 'Book Your Styling Consultation Now.' Tactic 3: Every single form submission is routed straight to a stylist sales call within 24 hours, regardless of how much of the guide the person actually engaged with. Success metric: Total MQLs generated this quarter. Target: 2,000.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
An annotated teardown memo: each defect named, its severity, why it matters, and one concrete fix per defect.
See a reference example
Care.com teardown note (excerpt) DEFECT: 'Local caregiver checklist' gated behind a mandatory phone number. FIX: Ungate the checklist; gate only the caregiver-matching request form further down the funnel, once intent is already proven. DEFECT: Every download triggers an immediate outbound sales call. FIX: Score engagement first (pages read, time on guide); route only high-engagement downloads to a human, route the rest into a nurture sequence.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Correctly identifies the gating defect and explains the search/trust cost
- Correctly identifies the MQL-only success metric as the lead-gen-theatre defect
- Does not flag either distractor as a real defect