"...the client be able to copy-paste our words or graphs into his own deliverable. Because that is literally what will happen." I've spent most of my career in

"...the client be able to copy-paste our words or graphs into his own deliverable. Because that is literally what will happen." I've spent most of my career in marketing, and as far as I can tell, this happens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The one exception I've encountered was working at Apple, where people expected you to hammer out a beautiful and convincing Keynote deck on your own. Everywhere else, people more or less copypasted whatever decks, charts, graphs, and bullets their agencies had sent them. The problem with copypasting is that it can lead to a game of telephone. A sequential erosion in the quality of information. If you're not keeping track of who's been lifting and plagiarizing and pasting which information from which sources, at how many steps along the value chain, you end up with a deck full of secondhand information and hearsay. The quality of the information (or confidence in the information) fades a bit with each subsequent generation of copypasting. Sort of like lossy data encoding. At larger organizations, as you might imagine, there will be many "generations" of each presentation. This makes the lossiness issue even worse. The culprit here is always time. It's exactly as the author of this article points out. People don't set out to make shitty decks, or to copy and paste information, or to tl;dr their way through analysis. But that's just what people have to do to survive. If you're spending (conservatively) 20-30 hours a week in meetings, and many of those meetings leave you with deliverables on tight deadlines, you're going to be eking out any and all efficiencies that come your way. I've never done any copypasting, and if I'm being honest with myself, it's probably hurt me more than it's helped me.