Six months in one sitting

Once a year, usually in July when the briefs thin out, I take a brand's feed and read six months of it in one sitting. The posts themselves, in order, top to bottom, the way nobody in the building has ever read them.

It takes about forty minutes and it is the most useful forty minutes of the summer.

January is careful. The captions are short and sure of themselves, the Arabic has been checked, the photographs share the same light. Somewhere around March a second voice arrives, a little louder, a little keener to sell. By May there are three fonts. By June the brand is reposting a delivery app's promotion in the app's colours, and the caption reads as though it was written at ten at night by someone who had already written eleven that day, because it was.

January and June are two different people. One is careful and one is tired, and neither was told about the other, because nobody looks at a feed that way. A post is approved on its own, on a Tuesday, against the post before it. The guideline sits in a shared drive with a palette and a paragraph on tone of voice, and every single post can be argued to comply with it.

The reader sees the scroll, and only the scroll. A new customer who lands on the profile sees the whole six months at once, thumb moving, and forms a view of the brand in the time it takes to reach the bottom. The view is of the drift.

Nobody measures drift. There is no line on the dashboard for how far June has wandered from January, and the weekly report is, by construction, one week long.

Consistency is not a guideline in a document. It is what a reader sees when they scroll, and nobody in the building has scrolled.