All Hail the Consumer-Grade Standard: Why Employer Brand Work Needs the Same Craft as Consumer Advertising

Summary: Employer brand work is rarely held to the craft standard of consumer advertising, and that gap costs the field credibility with executives and respect from the people it is meant to reach. Matt Gilbert, Managing Partner at WorkingTheory, traces the idea back to his years in brand consultancy, advertising, and management consulting, and to long debates with co-founder Devin DaRif. He argues that careless writing and design tell candidates their decision wasn't worth the effort, that the bar stays low mainly because of training, and that a "consumer-grade" standard (a term used by a Nike client) is the only honest yardstick, especially now that AI can produce copy and graphics at volume.

It was a cold and windy early 2026 when I started WorkingTheory with Devin DaRif. There was talk of recession. High interest rates. Tech firms slashing jobs. War. Politics on fire. Our timing wasn't planned. We were simply ready.

The ideas that drove WT go back a long way. Through the late 1990s, up to 2000, I worked at Siegel & Gale and had the chance to experience brand strategy and design at a pretty high snobbery level. The standards I'd been trained on, and embraced, were hard to see in employer brand. My short forays into NYC's B2C advertising ethisphere showed me how competitive that world was. Wow. As bad as Thunderdome from Mad Max. The craft standards have to be high or you don't win clients. You don't get put on projects, or win awards, or get any respect. In that world, you truly do have to fight for your right to party. In my management and strategy consulting period right out of Stern (before my MFA), it was just as much, just more corporately dressed. I didn't see the standards I'd experienced in those other domains, and it had me super confused. Why not? That's where Devin comes into the picture.

Devin and I were colleagues at Bayard and had glorious long chats about employer brand, craft standards, inefficiencies, and whether they were built in or flukes or mistakes that got through. Many of those kinds of conversations, and whiteboards, and workshops. There was a lot that seemed like it could be improved, if not outright solved. Finding a job is a daunting process. Hiring people is a daunting process. Retaining and engaging people is also a daunting process. Why, after decades of supposed progress, are there so many issues and challenges and frictions and barriers and biases and gaps?

When Devin left Bayard for the bright lights of in-house employer brand leadership, we continued the tradition over dinner, and wine. And usually too much of that. Debate is a good way to describe it. If you happened to be sitting next to our table, it could also be called a highly spirited argument. This was almost 15 years ago, and we're still talking about the same structural issues, the same woes, the same falsehoods. The field is still misunderstood. It still can't measure its own impact well enough to stop defending itself in principle.

Employer brand overwhelmingly gets treated like an ad campaign. There's nothing wrong with that, but we don't describe it that way, and it confuses people, like executives who don't understand how this truly helps or how to measure it. We don't say what we mean, so we don't mean what we say.

Low craft standards are a dis, whether or not anyone means them that way. Every piece of careless writing tells the person reading it that their decision wasn't worth the effort. Every poor example of design, typography, or insulting stock imagery says to the viewer, you don't matter enough to us. In consumer advertising, that mistake costs you the job, the client, and the rights to your firstborn. In employer brand, it costs nothing, which is why it keeps happening.

People buy the product rather than the copy, but they sure do use that copy or creative or storytelling to size up the purchase. In employer brand, I've seen maybe one or two shining examples of writing, storytelling, and design work that might be worth paying for. Most, not. Not even a little. The exchange of money is not the point, it's the agreement of value exchange that money is good at measuring. It's simple. I know that's a harsh standard, but it's the only honest one. People go online to find Super Bowl commercials and rewatch them, which is a way of paying with their time and attention. Students pay to apply to colleges. Using that as the yardstick is the only way, and I do mean only, to lift the field up. Without asking "how much would you pay for it," even hypothetically, and being honest with what comes back, employer brand will continue to be a thorn in your marketing team's side. It'll continue being misunderstood at executive levels. It'd be seen more negatively than people will say out loud, because you may compete for budget and executive attention. Even with the people who play nicely.

I'm not trying to be snobby or all high-horse, but there's a lot of work out there that makes you scratch your head and wonder how it represents the standard we'd want for a professional practice. It got paid for. It got produced. It got signed off. I'm sure everyone reading has seen at least one. Look at what happened when Target showed massively poor judgment with a children's Halloween costume that critics said evoked racist minstrel caricatures. The world lit up. Customers said something. Reporters wrote about it. The company pulled it and apologized within days. Employer brand work never gets that kind of reaction, good or bad, which tells you how few people outside the field are looking at it at all.

Budget, ownership, and approvals all play a part. The bigger reason the bar is too low is training. Spending years in a design firm, brand consultancy, or ad agency, fighting tooth and nail for your ideas, your clients, and awards, is where eyes and ears get trained for the craft standard. Creative careers are kind of ruthless in their own way, ultra-competitive because there are so many great talents. Employer brand needs a few double shots of that.

A client once described the standard I'm talking about as "consumer-grade." That client was Nike. They meant the work should be held to the same standard the company holds its consumer branding, marketing, and advertising to. It's a case of knowing it when you see it, which makes it extra hard.

When the work isn't consumer-grade, it lowers the standard for everyone. It also confirms what skeptical executives already suspect: that employer brand is a soft function that doesn't deserve serious investment. Just look at it. Just read it. We call an EVP a generic headline, like "Make an impact here." "Make a difference today." No CEO reads those two common forms of EVP and says, wow, I feel like I really understand the spirit of our org better, or, wow, I feel like I've been invited into our world and helped by what I've learned. I'm being a little snarky here to make a point. A low standard is invisibility. Only people in the field will pay any attention, and that might come more from a feeling of isolation and a need to self-validate. Sounds a lot like a self-inflicted, self-fulfilling prophecy.

So we built WorkingTheory to hold employer brand to a higher standard, starting with rigor in research. And not just rigor. Asking fundamentally different questions. We all know what people want from working because it's what we all want. Ask it in the negative and you can see how settled it is. Who doesn't want to be paid? Who wants to hate what they do, or can't wait to not get along with any of their co-workers? Who would like no chance to learn or grow? Nobody, obviously. What we don't know is the "why" behind all those larger work and career and quality of life topics. And we don't know how best to bring those things to fruition inside a company that has to weigh what they cost against what they're worth. We also wanted a firm whose work is always held to a consumer-grade standard, because it's the only way to distinguish anything from anything else. With AI now able to crank out pounds of graphics and copy per click, it's even more important.

People deciding where to spend their working lives deserve work made with the same care as the ads that sell them sneakers.