Copy of copy of campaign

Friday note. Most of an advertising account was never built. It was copied.

Somebody needs a new campaign, the fastest route is the duplicate button, and the button writes the name for them. Copy of Copy of Campaign 3, three generations down from something that worked once.

The instinct is right. Duplicating keeps whatever worked, it takes a minute instead of an afternoon, and for one person running everything before the weekend it is the only reason anything goes live at all.

What copies with it is everything nobody is looking at. An excluded audience from a season two years ago. A placement switched off in an hour of panic. A bid cap set when the product cost less. A radius drawn around a branch that has since moved. A start date that made sense at the time. None of it was decided this month, and all of it is spending this month.

Ask why a setting is the way it is, three copies down, and the honest answer is that it arrived with the campaign it came from.

Teams describe this as consistency. Consistent structure, consistent audiences, nothing chopped and changed every week, and there is a version of that which is a genuine virtue. But consistency is meant to be a position somebody holds on purpose. This is a position nobody remembers taking, inherited through a button, kept because keeping it was quicker than reading it.

Nothing flags it, because nothing failed. The settings did not break. They were simply never chosen, and in most accounts the oldest unexamined guess is the one with the most money still behind it.