Still green on Friday

Friday, three days after the day, and the accounts are still green.

From the platform side you can see it at scale, every year, the same week. A great many advertisers in the Kingdom are still serving the National Day creative. The flag, the greeting, the offer whose licence named the dates it was for. Nobody switched it off, because nobody was asked to.

The campaign had a start date. It had a budget. It had a name with the year in it and a film that took three weeks. What it did not have was an end, because in the setup screen the end date is optional and the default is to run until the money is gone.

So it runs. The auction has emptied since Tuesday, so the impressions are cheap, and cheap is what makes it dangerous. The account is buying attention from people for whom the moment has passed, at a price low enough that nobody looks. Nothing converts off a greeting on a Friday. The cost per anything that matters is now the highest in the account, hidden inside a line that looks efficient.

The accounts I have watched grow had nothing better in the film. They had somebody who, in the setup, typed a date into the box. Wednesday. Thursday at the latest. A decision made once in September so that nothing had to be decided on a Friday, when the team is at home and the account is not.

An end date is a decision. Leave the box empty and the default makes it for you, at the full budget, and the default has never once chosen Wednesday.