Nobody here has ordered it

For two years I planned media for products I had never bought.

Not out of laziness. It genuinely never occurred to me that buying one was part of the job. The brief arrived, the product was described in it, there were photographs, a positioning statement, a page of consumer insight from a research house. I had everything the process said I needed, and I built plans that were technically correct and slightly hollow, and could not have told you why.

What changed my mind was watching a great many small advertisers at once from the platform side, and then running brands where the returns landed in my own numbers.

The accounts that grew had one thing in common that never appears in a capability deck. Somebody on the team had bought the product. With their own card, through the normal checkout, to their own address. They knew the confirmation email was ugly. They knew the courier rang at seven in the morning. They knew the size guide was wrong, because they had ordered the wrong size. They knew the app made you create an account before it would show you a price.

The accounts that stalled were run by people who had only ever seen the product as an image in a folder. Every decision they made was about the image, because the image was the only part they had touched.

Nobody can optimise a photograph. You can brighten it, crop it, put a price on it, and that is the entire range of moves available to a person who has never held the thing.

The cheapest brief an agency will ever receive costs the price of one order, paid for by the agency, delivered to the agency, opened in the office. I have almost never seen it placed.