If you cannot pause it

For a long time I thought the weekly call was how you governed an outsourced media team.

Sixty minutes, a deck, what was done, what is next, questions from the client, actions at the end. It looked like control. It had the shape of it.

I have since sat on both sides of that call often enough, and watched enough accounts from the platform side, where you can see what actually happened to the money, to know what the call is. It is the agency's agenda, read aloud. The account is presented, not inspected. Every number on the slide was chosen by the people being reviewed, and the week's real decisions, the campaign switched off between calls and the one switched on in its place, are on no slide at all.

Governance turned out to be three plain things, and none of them needs a meeting.

Admin access to the account, in the client's own name, at the top of the hierarchy, so that nothing is visible to the agency that is invisible to the client. Not a monthly export. The account itself.

The change log, read by someone on the client side, at least weekly. Not for the numbers. For who changed what, and when, and whether it matches what was said on the call.

And the right to pause spend yourself, today, without a ticket, a courtesy message, or a wait for someone in another time zone to wake up.

The third one is the test. Most clients I have watched have the first. Some read the second. Almost none would use the third, because it feels rude. It feels like an accusation. So the account runs, the invoice arrives, the call happens on Tuesday, and everyone calls that oversight.

If you cannot pause it, you are not governing it. You are subscribing to it.