Plumbing season

The Gulf is empty this week, and from the platform side you can already tell which accounts are going to have a good November.

Not from the spend. Spend is down almost everywhere, and rightly. The tell is in what the account is doing while the spend is down.

Most are doing nothing. The last campaign is paused, the founder is in London or Cairo or on the coast, and the account looks like a shop with the shutter half down. It will reopen in September and start from where it left off: a tracking setup that was never quite right, a product feed with forty items missing their photographs, a creative folder called final, final2 and final final, and a naming convention that means nothing to the person who will be hired in October.

A few accounts look different in July. Quiet on the surface, busy underneath. The conversion event is finally firing on the right page. The feed has been cleaned so that every product has a price, a size and a picture that matches. The catalogue is mapped, so that the November ads can show the right thing to the person who looked at it. The creative library has been sorted into what worked, what did not, and why, with names a stranger could read. The audiences have been rebuilt from the customer file rather than from a guess made two years ago.

None of this appears in a report. Nobody is congratulated for a clean product feed. It is plumbing, and plumbing is noticed only when it fails, usually on the busiest day of the year.

I have watched enough accounts through enough summers to stop reading the quiet ones as idle. The ones that grew in the fourth quarter were nearly always the ones that had spent July under the floorboards.

The quiet month is not a gap in the year's results. It is where the fourth quarter is built, by people who look as if they have gone on holiday too.