The Recommendation That Skips the Fine Print: Auditing an ESP Pitch
Objective: Given a teammate's Slack-style ESP recommendation memo, find the reasoning defects, brand-recognition bias, missing deliverability check, and single-axis pricing comparison, before it reaches a VP.
You're a marketing coordinator at Walker & Company Brands (Bevel). A teammate drafted a quick recommendation to switch ESPs and pinged you to sanity-check it before it goes up the chain.
Read the memo like the lesson's Common Mistakes section and flag every place it optimizes for the wrong variable.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
Turns a read-through into a structured, shareable defect list
The process
Specimens to review
This memo is about to go to a VP for sign-off. Find every reasoning defect before it ships, not just whether the conclusion is right or wrong.
Slack message, #marketing-ops "Ran the numbers, I think we should switch to Mailchimp. Everyone knows the brand, the editor is really clean, and at our list size it's $26.50/month which is cheaper than what we're paying now. I say we move by end of month, this should be a quick win."
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
An annotated defect list, each finding tagged with severity and the specific reasoning gap, ready to send back before the memo reaches a VP.
See a reference example
Defect list, Rent the Runway ESP recommendation review 1. [CRITICAL] Brand recognition used as the deciding factor instead of automation fit 2. [CRITICAL] Pricing compared at one list-size snapshot, no check on whether automation is paywalled at that tier 3. [MODERATE] No deliverability comparison anywhere in the memo 4. [MODERATE] No migration plan behind the 'by end of month' timeline Recommendation: send back for a second pass scoring automation depth and deliverability before this goes to leadership.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Flags the brand-recognition and single-axis pricing defects as critical, not cosmetic
- Correctly identifies deliverability as absent from the memo
- Does not flag the two distractors as defects