We did a Rumsfeld.

The most expensive thing in marketing isn't a bad campaign. It's the campaign you didn't know you could run. Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns", applied to a Tuesday afternoon's ad review.

Kendall Roy runs Kit Rooms. He'd made a sales video for small football clubs and wanted to know if it worked. Most operators in his position would have shipped it, watched the impressions tick, and waited a fortnight to find out.

I said: have someone watch it as Ridley Scott. Have someone else watch it as the bloke running a football club in Brisbane. Two personas, one report, twenty minutes. The persona stack we'd already built for Articulate's own work — five named AI colleagues with lanes — was the substrate.

He said: what do you mean?

I built the stack on Higgsfield, ran it against his video, and handed back the report before his next call. Five tiers of how to do this exist. The top tier is what you remember from the old world — pay actual humans to watch your ad and tell you what they think. AED 50–60k, two months. The bottom tier is the persona stack we ran for him for the price of a coffee.

That's the gap. As Simon Willison put it on Lenny's Podcast in April: "It used to be, you'd come up with a spec and you hand it to your engineering team. And three weeks later, if you're lucky, they'd come back with an implementation. And now that maybe takes three hours." The cost of finding out has collapsed. The cost of not knowing the option exists hasn't.

This is what I install for clients now. Not hours, not decks — workflows that close the gap between "we should test this" and "we did, here's the answer." Built on the stack, handed over, owned by them. The Hype Radar is the filter that decides which of these workflows is actually worth installing in a client engagement.

Try this on Monday

Pick one asset you're about to ship — a landing page, a video, an email. Before it goes live, write down two people who are not your target buyer but whose reaction would matter. A senior creative. A sceptical procurement lead. A regulator. Then have them watch it. You'll be surprised what shows up.

That's a Rumsfeld. Quite funny, really.