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This is your go-to podcast for all things marketing, branding, and customer experience. We’re bringing you honest and fun conversations with bite-sized insights. Hosted by BrightSign’s CMO Brian Rowley and Head of Integrated Marketing Laura Smith, you’ll hear from industry pros, creatives, and innovators about what’s actually working in today’s evolving, digital-first world. No fluff — just real insights on how brands are connecting with audiences and driving growth. Tune in for fresh ideas, big thinking, and all the tips you need to take your marketing game to the next level.
30% of the meetings could have been handled in a different way, and we would have had a lot more time.
Laura Smith:Welcome to Prose + Comms: Engagement. Unplugged. I'm Laura Smith.
Brian Rowley:And I'm Brian Rowley.
Laura Smith:So I'm super excited today because it's me and Brian on our own, no guest, with, I would say, a fun topic. The topic is the meetings that waste marketing's time. Okay? Everyone's gonna have a perspective on this. Most marketers don't complain about the work.
Laura Smith:We usually complain about everything around the work. All the meetings that we're in, the approval process is, the constant communication, the committees of decision makers, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So a lot of our marketing teams are busy all day, but we struggle because we actually don't have time to get our work done. It's because we're sitting in meetings a good majority of our day. So today, we're gonna talk about all those meetings and the internal habits that quietly drain our teams.
Laura Smith:So let's dive in, Brian.
Brian Rowley:I'm ready.
Laura Smith:Okay. What's the most pointless marketing meeting you've ever been in?
Brian Rowley:Oh, one of the worst ones I ever did was, it was in a prior role. I actually flew from Boston to Japan for a two hour meeting, turned around and came back because they insisted that this meeting be in person. And it was like literally one of those things where you were just like, wait, what are we doing here? And why are we here? And it was literally like, I mean, we'll talk about this, but I mean, all the key things that make up just a horrible meeting, we're we're all present.
Brian Rowley:I mean, first of all, fourteen hours to get to it, only to fly fourteen hours again for a two hour meeting. It was ridiculous.
Laura Smith:How about you? I don't know if there's one pointless marketing meeting that I've ever been to. Wow. I mean
Brian Rowley:Don't narrow it down or anything.
Laura Smith:I feel like I mean, you're talking like the pre COVID days. Right? So I I would probably, you know, again, go back to that time where you were it was flying. I mean, I didn't have to fly to Japan, but definitely flying to show up for a quick meeting to then turn around. Number one, even if we the meeting was productive, how much money was wasted in that environment and at the time working at agency?
Laura Smith:So it's the client's money that they're willing to spend and paying for it, but it just feels so inefficient. But I guess so that's, like, more of the logistics, but I think some of the worst meetings I've been in is when you go to a brainstorm and nobody brainstorms. Like, nobody's prepared. No agenda has been set. So this again, I'm going back to the days where we we were kind of break filling up conference rooms of many people, different departments trying to generate great ideas, but there was no agenda to set the stage.
Laura Smith:No research to talk about here's the topic and here's all the things that may, you know, drive creativity. And then you sit around the table and everyone's staring at each other, and two people may be the two contributors. So that's about getting a lot of brains in the room to then have no outcome. That used to frustrate me a lot when I was in more of the creative and advertising world.
Brian Rowley:Well, especially when you have the amount of meetings that we have on our calendars every single week. And it doesn't matter. I mean, this company is no different than any other company that we've been at. Right? But, I mean, I know that when we were prepping for this, we sort of went through this exercise.
Brian Rowley:And I think I had mentioned to you that like last week, there were 32 meetings on my actual calendar. And sort of looked over the course of like the last sixty days and average was like 48 meetings a week. And when I look at it and I went through and was like, okay, this one was nonproductive. This one was productive. Like this, like, it was almost like 30% of the meetings could have been handled in a different way.
Brian Rowley:And we would have had a lot more time. And I know you've done a similar exercise, when we were doing it.
Laura Smith:Yeah. Like this week, this week, it's 25 meetings. And that's not I'm not that's not counting the ad hoc conversations and can we chat and, you know, work through something and whatever. So it that's a lot. And and it goes back to what I said at the beginning.
Laura Smith:When do people expect us to actually do our work? And that's really the outcome based work that has more impact. And so I I do believe that there are very productive meetings when, you know, instead of going on things back and forth on email at, you know, five to 10 times and having all these reply alls, clearly bring people in the room and let's have a conversation and make decisions. That's obviously gonna be a better way to handle it. I also do think, you know, ideating and brainstorming and, you know, kind of like collaborating, if you will, can be very productive in a meeting so long as you have the right people in the room and not just people who are sitting there not participating.
Laura Smith:That is one of my biggest pet peeves. If you are in a meeting, you need to speak. If you are not speaking or if others are are are stopping you from speaking, then you shouldn't be in the meeting. Like, that that's like, we've had, you know, so many meetings. We have so many people, and I'm I'm saying we, like, hear other companies, it's it's everywhere.
Laura Smith:And have the people on mute the whole time. They're not even talking. So to me, if, like, if you wanna have them to hear what you're saying or get the notes, that's what AI tools are for. It records it. Have those people get the notes.
Laura Smith:Truly bring in the decision makers you need in order to get to the outcome of that meeting.
Brian Rowley:But I think the opposite of that is equally as detrimental to a good meeting. And that is the person who just railroads everybody and just manipulates every conversation. And no matter, you know, what the topic is that you're trying to cover, which is why I think the agenda piece is so important is how many times do you sort of get into these meetings, and then the next thing you know, it's like someone says squirrel and half of the audience looks in the other direction, right? And they're chasing a whole new topic. And we're like, no, no, no.
Brian Rowley:We're not here to discuss that right now. We're here to discuss this. But if you don't have the agenda and the objectives and all of that laid out, then what ends up happening is the the meeting gets railroaded. And you never get the answers to what you were there for to begin with, which I think which is causes a lot of frustration for people as it relates to meetings.
Laura Smith:Yeah. And I think it does come down to having like, everyone has a role, right? Like we used to do races back where I was before. And it was like, who's responsible? Who's accountable?
Laura Smith:Who's contributing? Who's executing? Like, truly understand what everyone's role is because not everyone can have the same role. And there has to be a leader, and there has to be someone who's gonna go take the, you know, the the task and run with it or collaborate or whatever it may be. But so many times people go to meetings and say, I don't know why I'm here.
Laura Smith:And they should never feel that way. There should be a known role that you're playing. Again, I think agenda helps that, but also being more formal or a little bit more process oriented around what is everyone's role in this discussion. So there isn't this ambiguity. And then, of course, people then opt to go on mute and multitask.
Laura Smith:That's the other thing. You know everyone when they're on like, we all are doing it. I can see it. I could see it. I remember, like, years past, and Joey might even remember this from years past.
Laura Smith:But I would call people out on, like, I know you're not listening to this meeting right now. You are multitasking. We're all remote like this. That's too easy to do that. And people's eyes are wandering.
Laura Smith:You can tell they're typing. Again, if you're not in this meeting in focus, then you shouldn't be in the meeting. And that is, like, the the multitasking myth is like everybody knows that everyone's checked out and they're doing it, but no one really calls people on it. And here, Brian, I don't find like we do do that, which we could, but it's again, it's you're not focused. So then how are we gonna make this meeting so productive?
Brian Rowley:I I will tell you the one thing that drives me crazy, especially in the remote environment, is the people that are constantly firing messages in the chat window while the meeting's going on. Like, just this random things, right? That just come up and it's just like, what? Like, no, that's that, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about right now. Like, and those are usually the people that walk out of the meeting and then you bring something back up.
Brian Rowley:And it's like, oh, I don't remember that being discussed. No, of course you don't. Because you were too busy talking about the color of the sky versus what was really important that day. Like, I mean, it's not obvious. I mean, this sounds like a total like bitch session that we're having here in regards to meetings.
Brian Rowley:But I think the other thing too, though, is I do think there's some cultural elements to this, right? That actually play in. And I think that is also, you know, how many times do you show up to meetings where it's like an approval meeting and then 12 people are part of the meeting? It's like, we're never gonna get approval here. There's 12 people involved.
Brian Rowley:Like who's making the decision? And I think what ends up happening is a lot of people are afraid to take that ownership and say, this is my decision for fear of what the outcome of that could be. And I think culturally, you have to develop cultures that are like failures are okay, right? As long as they don't bankrupt the company type moments, right? But I think if you give people the authority to be able to say that, yes, you're the one who's making the decision.
Brian Rowley:And here's what we're targeting, here's what we're projecting the outcome to be, and give them the ability to manage to that. I think you have less of these, I need 50 people to make a decision.
Laura Smith:Right. I mean, too many cooks in the kitchen is never gonna be productive. Right? How many how many times and I and I, again, like, lived through this for so long. It's it's how many times does a does an idea, does a campaign, does a I don't know, whatever the output is, get worse the minute you start adding people into the approval process?
Producer Joey:Every time.
Laura Smith:Thank you, Joey.
Producer Joey:Every time it does.
Brian Rowley:Yeah, from a creative. There we go. There it is. But I think it's even worse. Not only sometimes does it get worse, sometimes it gets killed completely, because you can't create.
Brian Rowley:Right? You don't have the ability to be able to reach a consensus. And I think that's the problem.
Laura Smith:But to your point, Brian, it doesn't need to be everyone's decision. This is where someone has to own it and have a role, and they need to take feedback and listen to feedback, but it's not about everyone sitting in a room either complaining or raving about this idea that half the people have no really shouldn't have influence on, but also there's they have no as it as it kinda goes downstream, they have no role in that, you know, and how it works, how it doesn't work, or how effective it is. So it it is about keeping it to a contained group, knowing who the right members are and knowing that agenda. And ideally, that could be more productive. And and I think many listeners I mean, I hope, you know, lot of our listeners are marketers or creatives, etcetera.
Laura Smith:And they will get this as, like, in the marketing role. And I don't wanna say it doesn't happen in other roles, but I do believe that like in the role of marketing, because there's so much that we're involved in as the company, you know, as far as like sales and product and engineering and all that. There's so much that kind of, you know, rolls into our world that I believe that we happen to have this happen more often than a lot of other departments and other companies kind of experience.
Brian Rowley:Yes. I think marketing definitely is is one that sees it a lot more. But I think to that point though, too, I also think there are people that are out there, and executive roles that actually view the number of people in the room as how collaborative, right, the meeting actually is. So people see a room full of people and they're like, oh, look at that collaboration that's taking place. And the reality of it is, is, you know, you don't always have to have a room full of people in order for collaboration to take place.
Brian Rowley:You can do that with a handful of people. It's about having the right people at whatever stage a product is, that's going to get you a specific outcome, it is where it actually makes sense. I actually, one of the companies that I used to work for, one of the leaders there used to say, you know, that everyone in the room for every decision is not a culture of inclusion. It's actually one of insecurity. And if you think about that, it's actually a really accurate point, right?
Brian Rowley:It's people who are afraid they're missing something and they're afraid of not being a part of something. Whereas let the people who need to be a part of the discussion at that time be a part of it, and then trust that they are going to do their part as you're going to do your part to make sure that it's a successful outcome.
Laura Smith:Yeah. I I mean, I 100 I 100% believe that. I think people have so much FOMO. And so they're just like, why am I not in that? Or why is my department not in that?
Laura Smith:Get me in that. And I think that's just yeah. I think that's obviously the basis of insecurity, but it's no one has to like, how are we gonna be more productive? You know? And I think about that.
Laura Smith:Like, when I go back to my comment about people don't have a role in the meeting and they're sit quietly, then they they should be off doing work, like, being productive. Some days, I'm like, I wish I could be out there being productive versus sitting in the meeting. And so we need to empower our team members to just say, like, if there's no role for me here, I'm going to leave. Again, we use AI tools that that record our meetings and that follow-up with the outcomes and the takeaways. So let them read the notes because that just feels like a better use of of some folks' time.
Laura Smith:But, again, it goes back to this. Like, well, if they're not there, then what? Well, you know and and I think to on the note of, you know, the collaboration. I also think it's about it just because you need to collaborate or just because a decision needs to be made doesn't mean it has to be a meeting. Like, there can be other right?
Laura Smith:We have other mechanisms. There's emails. And I'm saying, like, email isn't always most effective. You gotta know when to take it out of email. But also Teams or whatever tool you're using for chat, like, can banter back and forth for a couple minutes with one, two, three people on a chat and get to your solution.
Laura Smith:So think about how quickly that was solved versus having to have another person block the time to then get in on that meeting. And I was reading an article earlier just about how it's not just the hour meeting or the half hour meeting, it's the twenty minutes leading up to the meeting. You're getting yourself organized, coming out of another meeting, maybe eating.
Brian Rowley:Well, you are. Not everybody is. That's you, because you know how to handle a meeting, right? But some people just show up to your point. Right?
Laura Smith:But then coming out of it, then it's like, oh, I've gotta now digest this or probably talk to someone about this. Or like, you know, it's carrying on. So that actual topic can take up to, you know, you know, an an extra half hour or whatever else on top of it. So it's not just the block of time. It's on your calendar.
Laura Smith:And remember we talked to April Williams about this a bit about how, like, how do how do we save our calendars or how do we, like you know? And I I haven't done a very good job of that, But it's fascinating because of how much more effective we could be if we didn't sit in so many meetings.
Brian Rowley:Yeah. I I would agree. But okay. So we've talked a lot about all the things that are wrong with meetings. Like There was some good.
Brian Rowley:There was some good. Well, little, not a lot, but what does a good meeting look like? Like, how do you organize it? I mean, like, what does that actually look like? What should people be focusing on in order to be able to achieve that?
Laura Smith:I think it's the opposite of everything or some of the things we said. Right? It's like having the agenda. Make sure everyone has a clear understanding of the topic and whatever they need to help either make a decision or come in to participate. It's having the roles kind of laid out.
Laura Smith:Like, there's the project owner. Here's people who are gonna be contributing. Here are people who are basically gonna say yay or nay at the end of the day. And I also think it's about making sure people are focused. Don't let people multitask.
Laura Smith:You know? If they're in the room, make sure that they're really they're engaged in it so it can be as productive as possible. Because if a if a meeting could last forty minutes instead of an hour, good for everybody. So if you can be very focused and use the time efficiently, then everyone wins. You know, when we say, oh, well, this is a pet peeve.
Laura Smith:I'm gonna go back to negative. But when people say, oh, I'm giving you three minutes back. Are you kidding me? Like, minutes. I mean, whatever.
Laura Smith:Sure. I can breathe for two seconds, take a sip of water. Three minutes isn't what we're looking to give people back. It's like, you know, twenty minutes on an hour call if we could really be efficient and productive.
Brian Rowley:Well, yeah. I mean, if you gave me twenty minutes back only for me to have another thirty minute call because all the right people weren't on there and nothing was accomplished in this meeting, Did you really give me anything? The answer is no. I mean, so I think that's part of it. And I think it's understanding, like, what are you trying to achieve?
Brian Rowley:Now, the interesting part of this is, you know, we do this all the time and we try to lay this out, but I mean, even holding ourselves accountable to this, like, why are we here? What is the purpose of this meeting? What is that like? I'm also a big one for like, if we could give agendas ahead of time so people can come prepared asking questions versus going through slides. I don't need you to read me a slide.
Brian Rowley:I can read. But once I have read it, I do need answers to certain things in order to move something along. So I think some of that too is an important part. And you know what, if the meeting ends, it was an hour meeting and ends in thirty minutes and everything was accomplished. Good for us.
Brian Rowley:We were productive.
Laura Smith:Right. And an hour meeting could be an hour meeting and still productive, and that's fine too as long as it's productive. Agreed. I think it might've been Bezos, I don't know, don't quote me on that, who used to basically make everybody, I think, send out like a PowerPoint. Something like, there was, like, a whole document they had you had to, like, fill out before the meeting to prep everybody.
Laura Smith:And it was just you if you didn't have that, you you don't you don't go to the meeting. It's kinda like the meeting doesn't happen then. So, I mean, it was a little bit more stringent, but I understand the nature of what they were trying to do is trying to make those
Producer Joey:So he has a he has a no PowerPoint role, and, like, he no PowerPoints are allowed to be in the meeting, and whoever is, like, running the meeting needs to send out it's not a white paper, but like, you know, a report basically, and everyone needs to read that either beforehand or like during the meeting, they all sit and read it. Yeah. In silence. Yeah. And then when they're all done, they can talk.
Brian Rowley:Yeah. That's an
Laura Smith:interesting It is interesting.
Brian Rowley:So I don't disagree with it, honestly. I mean, we used to do say it in five, right? So you'd have five slides, like get your point across in those five slides and let the rest of the time because one of the things that you find is you do get into these situations where it's just PowerPoint slides and there's no conversation and nothing is solved without the conversation.
Laura Smith:But the opposite of that is someone comes to a meeting and just talks at you, but you've got nothing to look at or refer to. So you're like, wait a What wait. I missed that some of that. So is it you know, so it does, you know, having some slides to drive the conversation to make sure there's like again, we why we create presentations to tell a story, to build up to something is helpful. But, yes, I think if you're gonna have them, they need to be a tool, not just, you know, someone reading off of a slide and telling you what it says.
Laura Smith:So it's that prep work, which is necessary in advance. Okay. So what would you do knowing your schedule and you had 34 meetings or 32 meetings last week? What would you do if you had five hours back in your week last week?
Brian Rowley:Wow. There's a list of things that I could do. I have the list of things right here that didn't get done. No, I mean, I think to be honest, I think you could spend more time being strategic and proactive versus the reactive piece of what we do, right? A lot of times we react to situations because we didn't have enough time to be able to plan.
Brian Rowley:So if you add that time back and you could do things like do a little bit of research into something so that the conversation at that next meeting could be more productive, That would be time that would be well spent. You'd also have an opportunity to maybe connect more with people on the team just to understand like, hey, what's working? What are you working on? How do we help versus we get tossed into a situation when everything's blowing up? Like, I just think there's some proactive things and there's some other things that could be done that would be a lot more helpful.
Brian Rowley:What about you?
Laura Smith:Well, your question, you can ask me yours.
Brian Rowley:I was just gonna say, and this kind of goes down because we talk about all the meetings that we have, but if you could ban one type of marketing meeting forever, like what would you never attend again?
Laura Smith:A status meeting with a running list of status items? Cause that is
Brian Rowley:the most Like a weekly status. Yeah. Like a
Laura Smith:weekly status just run through. It's basically why we stopped our team meeting to be run that way where it's like, go through everything everyone's doing. Let's read a list. It's the most unproductive way because it's really about like anyone can read a status report, going back to what we're talking about, read the status report, understand where things stand. Let's use the time to talk about solving the problems we're trying to solve, getting answers to questions that have left unanswered for a week because everyone's been busy and going 18,000 different directions.
Laura Smith:It's the the status of the status, that type of meeting. Yeah. What about you?
Brian Rowley:Yeah. I mean, I think that's a fair one. I think some of the other ones, and and it's not that I don't agree with these meetings, but like postmortems is an example. I like the concept of postmortem. What I don't like about postmortem is when people show up to the postmortem to explain all the reasons and try to justify the failures that we saw in the process, right?
Brian Rowley:So when there's a postmortem and no one wants to leave that conversation doing anything differently than how we entered the conversation, it just becomes a waste of time. And everybody thinks, oh, we need to do postmortems. Agreed. They're not a bad thing, but they're only a they're only a good thing if you're willing to act on the things that you learn from them.
Laura Smith:Yes. So I have a funny wanna wrap this up with a funny meme that I actually got served this morning in my Instagram feed because I do have a lot of, like, funny work things that I follow that just make me laugh. So it was very on point and on topic. So I wanna end with the meme that says meeting agenda, colon, one, say words, two, solve not nothing, three, schedule another meeting. It's exactly what we're talking about.
Laura Smith:Right? It's a world we live in, so there's ways to fix it. We know we can fix it. It's a conversation that we could have, Brian, for, you know, longer than now, in short, even bringing a guest on to help kind of navigate it and and discuss other angles of it. But great chat, and we wanna thank everyone for listening.
Laura Smith:And most importantly, if you like what you heard today, be sure to follow us.
Brian Rowley:Pros and Comms.