Live in the quiet month

The season's campaigns are almost always built to go live on the first day that matters.

It is what the calendar asks for. The promotional season opens with 11.11 and runs through White Friday to the end of November, so the plan works backwards from there: creative approved in October, assets delivered, structure built, the whole thing switched on at once on the morning of a day that carries a number.

Which means the account meets the most expensive weeks of its year with nothing in it that has been proven. New creative. A new structure. Audiences it has never served. A landing page that has never carried traffic. Every one of those has to be worked out, and it gets worked out in the auction, on live money, at November prices.

The learning is not optional and it is not free. The only thing actually on offer is the exchange rate.

An account can find out most of it now. The real structure, the real audiences, the real wording of the offer, live at a fraction of the budget, in a fortnight when nobody in the market is bidding hard, when being wrong costs the least it will cost all year, and while there is still room to be wrong twice.

I have rarely seen that survive a planning meeting on its own merits, and I understand why. It produces no launch, no assets to present, no date on a slide. It looks like money going out for no reason during the quiet weeks, defended by somebody promising it will pay for itself in three months.

It is the least impressive line in the plan and the only one buying time, which is the one thing November does not sell.

Nobody thanks you for the fortnight you spent being wrong in August.