John Faris has spent enough years running Red Door Interactive to know which campaigns will work before creative even starts. Not because he can predict the ideas—but because he can read the room. When the people behind a campaign agree on the problem, the priorities and what success looks like, the work lands. When they don’t, it doesn’t matter how brilliant the concept is.
Faris and Mallory Collins, Red Door’s Director of Brand Strategy & Creative, went back through the San Diego agency’s best-performing campaigns and found the pattern. The common thread wasn’t a killer concept or a breakthrough media buy. It was alignment. And the campaigns that failed? Those teams had talent, budgets and ambition. They just weren’t solving the same problem.
John Faris, President, Red Door Interactive
Mallory Collins, Director, Brand Strategy & Creative, Red Door Interactive
⏱️ JUMP TO KEY MOMENTS
05:46 – The three pillars: Problem, priority and performance alignment
07:47 – Early warning signs that your team is misaligned
10:57 – The danger of counterfeit yeses in brief sign-offs
14:20 – How to structure and price alignment as billable work
18:50 – Business managers and transparent client relationships
Three pillars and the decisions they force
Faris breaks alignment into three distinct pieces: problem alignment, priority alignment and performance alignment. Most agencies conflate alignment with communication—productive meetings, collaborative brainstorms, safe creative environments. But you can have all of that and still be misaligned on the fundamental question of what you’re trying to solve.
“Strategy is sacrifice,” Faris says, invoking Drucker, Porter and Jim Collins. “It’s as much about what you don’t do as what you decide to do.”
That’s the difference. Alignment isn’t everyone getting along. It’s everyone making the same trade-offs—and being honest about what gets deprioritized to make room for what matters.
The signals Collins watches for
Collins has learned to spot misalignment before it derails a campaign. The tells are consistent: leaders describe the problem differently when you ask them separately. The strategy shifts depending on who’s in the room—customer-facing teams emphasize long-term loyalty while the board pushes short-term efficiency. Teams are busy everywhere, meetings and deliverables and workstreams in motion, but nothing ladders toward the larger business goals.
Her diagnostic is four questions, and she recommends CMOs ask them before creative gets anywhere near a brief: What problem are we solving right now and why? What does winning look like in six to 12 months? What are we going to stop doing to make this work? And who’s assigned to what—and is that realistic given everything else on their plate?
If the answers don’t match across stakeholders, the brief isn’t ready. Full stop.
Are you willing to not be this?
Faris describes a scenario every agency professional has lived: the client signs off on a brief without believing in it. They’re excited to get to creative. They think the work will resolve whatever still feels unfinished. “We’ll fix it in post” becomes the unspoken assumption.
He borrows the concept of “counterfeit yeses” from Chris Voss’s Never Split the Difference—people saying yes to advance to the next step rather than because they’re committed. And the fix isn’t subtle. Red Door asks clients to physically sign briefs. Ink pen. Old school.
Collins pushes it further. In positioning conversations, she asks clients to name what they’re giving up. “If this is the position, are you willing to deprioritize these other things?” The deeper the trade-off conversation, the harder it is to fake buy-in. That’s the point.
Don’t call it alignment—call it a plan
Faris is direct about the business side: don’t call it alignment. Clients don’t pay for discovery, alignment or planning. But they pay for plans. Strategic plans. Brand briefs. Annual frameworks. The deliverable is the alignment—packaged in language clients value.
Red Door uses a framework called POST—Positioning, Objectives, Strategy, Tactics—with target KPIs mapped at each level. Every engagement runs through it, whether it’s a campaign brief, an annual plan or a marketing communications strategy. The framework forces decisions at every stage, and the decisions create the alignment.
Beyond initial engagements, Red Door builds strategic workshops into retainer relationships—quarterly or biannual sessions positioned around decision-making rather than brainstorming. “We’re careful not to position them as a stakeholder opinion workshop,” Faris says. The workshops dig into audience insights, customer journey friction, competitive research and category entry points. Long-term clients start requesting them more frequently once they see the value.
The people who say the uncomfortable thing
Red Door doesn’t use traditional account managers. They use “business managers”—people Collins describes as empathetically curious, the kind who understand a client’s business and strategy deeply enough to call out misalignment when it surfaces.
“We owe it to our clients to name it,” Collins says. “We’re honest about that. We believe there’s real risk to the quality of our work if we don’t.” The role isn’t about project management or keeping clients comfortable. It’s about telling clients what Red Door believes is true—not what they want to hear.
When misalignment surfaces mid-engagement, Faris reframes the reset around documentation rather than failure. “It’s not that you’ve done it wrong—it’s that it isn’t in one place that can be socialized throughout the organization, including to your boss.” It’s a human-centered approach: keeping your job means keeping your boss happy, which means laddering efforts back to business objectives.
One red flag Faris watches for: invisible stakeholders. People who aren’t in the room but hold the purse strings or influence over execution. If they exist, the alignment work isn’t done.
Learn more
Red Door Interactive
John Faris LinkedIn
Mallory Collins LinkedIn
Red Door Interactive LinkedIn
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