Named by whoever was awake

Final. Final v2. New campaign copy. Test. Test 2. Untitled.

Those are campaign names, and read before the numbers they are the most reliable thing in an advertising account.

That account is not badly run in any dramatic way. It is run by whoever was awake. Every line was made by a person solving that evening's problem, and none of them was made by a person expecting to be asked about it in nine months.

Then there is the other kind of account. Market, objective, offer, audience, creative version, month, all in the name, all in the same order every time. It looks like paperwork from the outside. In practice it is the only reason anybody can answer a question about last year. Which offer ran into the season. Whether the version with the discount beat the version with free delivery. What happened the last time this was tried in the second city. That account gets asked and it answers, and the answer does not depend on whether the person who set it up is still in the job.

Growth in a small account is mostly memory. Not judgement, not budget, not a better platform. The ability to remember what has already been tried, so the year is not spent finding it out again.

A naming convention is where an account keeps its memory. It is also the cheapest thing in the whole operation, five seconds a campaign, no tools, no approval, which is why it is the first thing dropped in a busy week.

That is how a two-year-old account ends up with no history in it, and an owner who is certain that everything has been tried.