My current gig.
Acquisition creative for a regulated insurance brand. Legal reads every word before it ships.
I run creative execution for insurance acquisition. Email, direct mail, paid digital. Nothing goes out until legal and compliance sign off, and most pieces get reviewed more than once.
Some of those notes are real. Some are a preference dressed up as a concern. Some are legit compliance flags. And a lot of them come from people who feel like they have to say something, because a review with no changes can feel like you weren't needed.
"Looks great, no notes" is apparently a hard thing to send.
You're holding a stack of mail, sorting it on the walk back from the box. Most of it is already headed for recycling before you reach the kitchen counter.
The people closest to a product typically want to put everything on it. Every feature, every proof point, eight million bullets on one piece of mail. They know too much, and the person at the mailbox is giving it four seconds.
A credit union prints its materials on whatever's on hand, usually a cheap HP on somebody's desk, the kind you expense from Staples. When a requester asks for a big, full-color photo, I'm thinking about the toner and the oversaturated mess that gets spit out. How it gets delivered is part of the design, not an afterthought. Once it leaves my desk I can't control any of it, so I build for that.
Creative I directed, and what it returned.
Four doors down there's a case study about cigarette advertising under federal law, from 2008. The rules were strict then. They're stricter now, and I'm better at this than I was.
None of it is really about the rules. It's whether the letter got opened, the number got called, the site got visited.