Content Quality Standards — 90% Rule

Overview

Asymmetric holds itself to a clear internal standard for content delivery: all work submitted to a client should be at least 90% complete and correct before it reaches them. This means proofreading for typos, checking for factual relevance to the client's industry, and ensuring basic accuracy (names, phone numbers, brand spelling) before submission. The client's role is to provide the final 10% — nuance, preference, and domain-specific refinement — not to fix foundational errors.

This standard was articulated explicitly by Mark Hope during a year-end review with BluePoint ATM, where repeated quality failures had become a significant source of client frustration and churn risk.

"What you should expect from us is you tell us what you want and we give it to you and it should be 90%, right? And you might say, yeah, I don't really like the way you said that or I don't like this term, but it should be 90% there. And we shouldn't make mistakes with typos and things."
— Mark Hope, BluePoint ATM Year-End Review (Dec 2025)

The Standard in Practice

What "90% Complete" Means

No unproofread AI drafts. AI-generated content must be reviewed for relevance, accuracy, and basic correctness before delivery. Sending raw AI output to a client is a process failure.
Brand names and proper nouns are correct. Client names, product names, and key terminology must be verified. (The BluePoint case included the client's own company name misspelled in an email subject line.)
Contact information is verified. Phone numbers, addresses, and URLs must be checked before publishing or submitting.
Content is relevant to the client's industry. Generic or off-topic content that requires the client to rewrite from scratch defeats the purpose of the engagement.
Posts and assets are proofread before going live. Content published directly (e.g., LinkedIn posts, blog articles) must be reviewed before publication, not after.

What the Client Should Not Have to Do

Catch basic spelling errors or typos
Rewrite content from scratch because the draft is irrelevant
Submit the same correction request three or four times
Proofread published content after it goes live

What the Client Should Do

Provide final approval on tone, terminology, and strategic framing
Flag industry-specific inaccuracies the agency couldn't have known
Request adjustments to style or emphasis

Why This Standard Matters

Most clients will not complain — they will simply leave. Mark Hope noted that approximately 75% of Asymmetric's clients don't review work before it's posted; they trust the agency to get it right. For those clients, quality failures go unnoticed until they erode results or damage the brand. For more engaged clients (particularly in technical or regulated industries), quality failures create unnecessary work and signal a lack of professionalism.

The BluePoint ATM situation illustrates the downstream cost of failing this standard:

Client time diverted from sales to marketing review
Erosion of trust in the agency relationship
Escalation to the agency principal (Mark Hope) and account reassignment
Near-churn of an account that was otherwise performing well on metrics

Account Manager Responsibility

The 90% rule is primarily enforced at the account manager level. The AM is responsible for:

Reviewing all content before it reaches the client
Developing sufficient industry knowledge to catch relevance errors
Ensuring website edits, social posts, and blog drafts are complete and accurate before submission

When an AM is overloaded (e.g., managing 16–18 projects simultaneously rather than the standard ≤10), quality degrades predictably. The BluePoint case was attributed directly to an under-resourced PM filling an AM role without the bandwidth or domain knowledge to maintain standards.

Mark Hope's commitment following the BluePoint review: personally review content before client delivery and join bi-weekly calls until the account is stabilized under a dedicated AM.

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