Open four days a year

From the platform side there is a kind of advertiser who is open four days a year.

Flowers, chocolate, a cake in a box, a gift set, a small jeweller. They arrive about a week before the day, spend hard for five days, then go quiet until the next one. Valentine's Day on Friday, Mother's Day in March, a national day in the autumn, the week before the new year. Four days, and most of the year's revenue sits on them.

What the account looks like when it wakes up is the problem. It has not run in three months, so it knows nothing. It spends the first two days learning who buys, which is exactly what it learned last February, at a price set by every other florist in the city doing the same thing in the same week. By the time it knows, the day has gone and the budget is off.

Everything that would have made that cheaper had already been bought and paid for.

The people who ordered last February are in that account. So are the ones who put a bouquet in a basket and left. So is a list of numbers from the year before, and a following gathered while the last day was on.

None of it was kept warm. A list nobody has written to in a year has stopped being a list and become a folder. The asset did not expire. It was left outside in the weather.

The operators who come out of these days better spend no more across the year. They stay open at a trickle: a small daily budget on the people who already bought, one message a month worth opening, and enough presence to notice what changed.

The four-day advertiser is not buying attention on the day. He is buying the same customer for the third time, at the highest price of the year, because nothing from the first two was kept.