A2A · Deal Diagnostic™

Reading the business under the brief

A sample deal read for a fictional venture-backed brand whose growth brief hides a broken model. This is the Zombie Brief discipline, running in the product. (Fictional account; illustrative.)

Deal Diagnostic™ · July 8, 2026

Verdance — Deal Diagnostic

The brief asks for a growth campaign, but the numbers under it describe a business that loses money on every customer it wins. Name that before you pitch — or you'll own a failure you couldn't have prevented.

Do this next

Before you respond, get the three numbers the brief leaves out — repeat rate, contribution margin, and acquisition cost by cohort — and open the next conversation with what they show. Reframe from “here's the campaign” to “here's what the math says we should fix first.”

The read

What they're really asking

A marketing brief sitting on a business-model problem.

Zombie brief

Where the math breaks

It costs more to win a customer than one is worth, and there's no repeat purchase anywhere in the brief.

Negative unit economics

Who owns it if it fails

You do — the brief is built to make the agency the named cause.

Scapegoat risk

How winnable is this

Not as written — but winnable if you reset what success means first.

Walk Reset Qualified Ready

Winnability score 38/100

Bottom line

This isn't a creative brief; it's a financial gap someone hopes you'll cover with a campaign. Name it and reset success — or decline. Broken math is the tell, not the ambition.

The brief reads healthy because it leads with the numbers that hide. The headline is gross merchandise value and a blended acquisition cost — figures that average the unprofitable part away. There's a bold new-customer target and no mention of churn, repeat, or second orders, which usually means the business can't keep the customers it has. And the growth only pencils if the next funding round arrives on schedule: it's funded by capital, not by customers. None of that is fixable with creative. Marketing is the throttle, not the engine — a great campaign here just makes the company acquire unprofitable customers faster. The job before the pitch is to separate the ambition (fine) from the math (broken), and to say so while you still have the standing to.

The sequence

Step 1

Run the four tells and request the three missing numbers before you scope anything. Ask for repeat/reorder rate, contribution margin per unit after all variable costs, and acquisition cost broken out by cohort or channel — not the blended figure. If they can't or won't share them, that's your answer.

When — before you write a single line of the pitch.

The blended and top-line numbers are designed, consciously or not, to look healthy. The three you're asking for are the ones that reveal whether a customer is worth more than it costs — the only question that matters here. Asking for them also signals you think like an owner, not a vendor.

Step 2

Name it early, in plain words, before the pitch. Deliver it as a partner, not a critic:

“The numbers under this brief don't close yet — it costs more to win a customer than one is worth, and there's no repeat in the plan. Here's what I'm seeing, and the conversation I think we should have before we talk campaign.”

When — in the next conversation, not in the deck.

Said early, it reframes you from the vendor who executes a doomed brief to the advisor who caught what others missed. Said late — after you've pitched and it fails — it sounds like an excuse. The standing to say it expires the moment you accept the brief as written.

Step 3

Reset success to a metric the business can actually move — or decline. If they'll engage, anchor the work to contribution margin per cohort and repeat rate, not top-line growth, and scope it to fixing the leak before pouring in more spend. If they only wanted a scapegoat, walk: declining a Zombie Brief isn't lost business — it's declining to be the named cause of a failure you could never have prevented.

When — before any statement of work is signed.

You can't fix negative unit economics with a campaign; you can only make the bleeding faster or slower. Resetting success — or walking — is the only move that protects both the client's outcome and your reputation. The agencies that survive are the ones that read the math and named it early.

Read the math before you own it.

The Deal Diagnostic reads the business under a brief and catches the one that's asking you to mask a broken model. If you'd like a second read on a real brief before you pitch it, let's talk.

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