Keep the post, cut the media

The Sunday after an identity day, the post gets measured as though it were an advertisement.

Reach. Engagement rate. Cost per thousand. Then, if somebody in the room is brave, the number of orders it can be shown to have caused, which is always small and always arrives with an explanation attached.

The explanation is not needed, because the post was never acquisition. Look at who actually forwarded it. The sales team. The operations manager. Somebody's sister, somebody's cousin, two suppliers, a distributor, three people who used to work there and still feel some ownership of the logo. An identity-day post is an internal document with a public address.

That is not a complaint. A company saying something true about the place it works in, in a way its own people will forward without being asked, is worth the writing and the design and the fortnight of approvals. Pride inside a building is not a soft outcome. It shows up in who stays and who answers the phone at nine at night.

What does not survive the same test is the media. Paid support behind a post whose real audience already holds a staff badge buys attention from strangers who do not know who is speaking and have no reason to find out, on one of the few days in the year when every competitor is bidding for the same feed.

Name the job honestly. If the job is pride and goodwill, it belongs to a different budget line, and it is cheap there. If the job is acquisition, it needs a product, a price and a reason to move today, and sepia will not carry any of the three.

So I keep the post, and I cut the media behind it.