Not Make Them
literally angry.
Usually.
the first substantive deliverable of any new engagement is an honest assessment of existing content.
These honest assessments, delivered to people who have been responsible for creating or approving the existing content, reliably produce some version of discomfort.
Sometimes it’s defensiveness. Sometimes it’s relief, which sounds like the opposite of anger but often presents similarly in the first few minutes. Sometimes it’s a very quiet recognition that what I’m describing is something the person already knew and was hoping nobody would ever say out loud.
I do it on purpose, and it’s one of the most valuable things I do for them.
Why the Honest
Assessment Matters
Most content engagements begin with a brief that describes what the client wants to build. This is actually backwards.
Before you can usefully plan what to build next, you need to run a proper content audit — to understand what already exists and what it is actually doing.
Not what the client hopes it is doing. Not what the analytics dashboard shows when you look at it optimistically.
What it is actually doing: which pieces are performing, which are invisible, which are actively hurting the domain, which are redundant, outdated.
What is good, but underperforming for fixable reasons.
This assessment is uncomfortable because it requires looking at the archive without the protective filter of your effort. It does not matter to me, for the purposes of the assessment, how hard the team worked on a given piece, or how much the CEO loved it at the time.
The question is only and merely and crucially, Is this serving the audience, the goals of the content operation, now.
the answer can be no. Often, the answer is no.
Clients who haven’t ever had this conversation suffer the burden of bloated archives full of content that isn’t working, strategies building on a foundation without understanding what that foundation is made of.
The honest assessment clears all that up before the new work begins. It is a good feeling, or at worst a bad feeling followed by a good feeling.
What This Actually
Looks Like
I spend time — real time, not a skim or a cursory glance — reading the existing content before I say anything about it. I look at the analytics, yes. I also read the pieces themselves.
numbers don’t tell you everything about quality. Sometimes they even lie.
So here’s what I’m looking for:
good stuff that’s not working.
Pieces that are genuinely strong — specific, original, well-argued — but are invisible because of technical issues, lame meta, thin internal linking, an audience-targeting problem.
These are priorities for remediation, not deletion.
bad stuff that is nevertheless working.
High-traffic content that doesn’t reflect the brand, or reflect it well, or is ranking for wrong reasons, or is attracting the wrong audience.
This one is more complicated than it looks.
An undifferentiated middle.
Posts that are adequate but not distinctive — it could have come from anywhere, it reflects no particular expertise, it covers topics because they seemed like topics to cover, rather than because there was something specific to say about them.
This is usually the majority of the archive. About 80%.
The structural problems.
Duplication, cannibalization, gaps in topical coverage, missing internal links, outdated information still being surfaced. These are fixable. They can often have an outsized impact, for good or ill.
Then I write this up, and present it plainly. Here is what the archive contains. Here is what is working and what isn’t. Here is why. Here is what I would prioritize fixing before we build anything new.
The Reaction
The reaction to this is never going to be neutral.
clients who respond with genuine engagement — who ask questions, push back on specific assessments, want to understand the reasoning — are the ones I know I can do good work with. They are not defensive about the past, they’re interested in the future.
The clients who respond with a variant of “yes but we had reasons for all of that” — who treat the assessment as an audit to be defended against, rather than data to act on — require a different kind of handling.
Usually I have a direct conversation about the purpose of the assessment: not to assign blame, but to understand the situation clearly enough to improve it. Most of the time, that conversation gets us to a productive place.
Occasionally, the honest assessment reveals something more fundamental: that the content problems I’ve been asked to fix are symptoms of organizational problems I cannot fix, and the engagement I’ve been brought in for is not the engagement they actually need.
These conversations are harder. They are also the most valuable thing I can offer. The secret is that content is a window into the beating heart of an organization.
What we tell the world is who we are.
Most Vendors
Will Not Do This
The honest assessment isn’t standard practice. We begin with enthusiasm about what we’re going to build, not a clear-eyed evaluation of what already exists.
This is about incentive structure — it is more pleasant to talk about new work than to evaluate old work — and partly risk management.
An honest assessment might reveal the client needs something different from what we are selling. It might produce a difficult conversation early in the relationship, when everyone would rather be in the honeymoon phase.
I do it anyway. The alternative is building on a foundation I don’t understand, which produces worse work and, inevitably, a more difficult conversation later.
Tell the truth and tell it early. It will always be the most efficient path.
The discomfort of an honest assessment at the beginning is much cheaper than the discomfort of explaining, six months in, why the work hasn’t moved the needle.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the client relationships that make or break the work.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · Book a discovery call