25 Reasons Why You Didn't Get a Callback...Even Though Your Tape was FIRE
Tue Nov 25 2025
As someone who’s booked over 50 national commercials and has spent the last decade deep in the trenches of commercial casting, it’s taken me a long time to learn one thing:you are almost never the reason you don’t get a callback.
Most of the time it has nothing to do with you, your talent, or your tape.It’s the chaos behind the curtain — the brand, the agency, the director, the client’s cousin, the storyboard artist, the budget, the weather, Mercury retrograde… all of it.
So today, I’m breaking down the 25 reasons you didn’t get a callback — even though your tape was absolute fire.
More
As someone who’s booked over 50 national commercials and has spent the last decade deep in the trenches of commercial casting, it’s taken me a long time to learn one thing:you are almost never the reason you don’t get a callback. Most of the time it has nothing to do with you, your talent, or your tape.It’s the chaos behind the curtain — the brand, the agency, the director, the client’s cousin, the storyboard artist, the budget, the weather, Mercury retrograde… all of it. So today, I’m breaking down the 25 reasons you didn’t get a callback — even though your tape was absolute fire.