Growing slower than the month

Every April a report lands with a number like forty per cent on the front of it, and the room applauds.

Up forty on February. The chart has the shape everyone hoped for, and the meeting moves on to next steps.

From the platform side you see the thing that report cannot. Not one advertiser, a great many of them at once, in the same categories and the same weeks. And in a peak month whole categories do not grow by forty per cent. They double. Dates, sweets, gifting, groceries, anything that ends up on a table with guests around it.

So a business up forty in a month where its category is up ninety has just had its worst month of the year. The number went up and the position went down, and both are true at once, which is why the applause is so easy.

Growth in a peak month is mostly the calendar. The tide came in and every boat rose. The only number that belongs to the business is its share of what moved, and it almost never appears in the review, because share is slow to get, easy to argue with, and reads far worse than a green arrow.

I have watched teams build a quarter of planning on a result that was, in truth, a slower version of everybody else's. The forecast gets written on it, and the budget request after it. Then a flat month arrives with no tide in it, and the growth that was borrowed from the calendar has to be produced by the business, and the business has never once done it.

So the first question about a peak is not how much the business grew. It is how much the month grew, and whether the business beat it.