Everyone bids on the same day

From the platform side, the first week of November looks like one morning repeated across a great many accounts. Budgets go up. All of them, at once, by roughly the same amount, for the same fortnight.

Nobody on any one account can see the others. Each team is running its own plan: the offer is agreed, the creative is built, the daily budget doubles in the week before 11.11 because that is what the plan says. From inside one dashboard it looks like a decision. From above it looks like weather.

An auction does what an auction does when every bidder arrives together. The price of reaching the same person on the same day rises, often by something close to the discount being advertised, and it rises by an amount that appears on nobody's plan, because the plan was written in October against September prices.

The account reads this as the platform getting expensive. Nothing on the platform changed. Everyone else's plan has landed at the same time as yours.

What the number hides is where the premium comes from. The customer's twenty per cent came out of the margin, and a finance director signed it. The auction's twenty per cent also comes out of the margin, and nobody signed it. It arrives as a slightly worse return on the spend, in a report read after the month has closed, and it is explained as competition, which is true and is not an explanation.

The discount, in other words, is paid twice. Once to the customer, on purpose. Once to the auction, by default. Only the first payment was approved, and only the second was certain.

The race to the bottom in November is described as a race on price. From the platform side it runs at both ends of the P&L at once, and the plan budgeted for one of them.