Still running

Every summer the same ad follows me around. Eid offer, ends soon. It is the last week of July.

The offer ended in June. The landing page either redirects quietly to the homepage or still shows the countdown, stopped at zero, which is worse. The ad itself is fine. Good photograph, clear price, a button. It is simply advertising something that no longer exists, to a city that is mostly not here, on a budget somebody set in May.

From the platform side I have watched this at scale, and it is the clearest tell I know for an account with nobody in the chair. Not the spend level, not the results, the expiry. A live ad for a dead offer means that on the day the offer ended nobody was there to notice, and on every day since, nobody has looked.

What people forget about a campaign is which way the default runs. Launching it took a decision. A brief, an approval, a creative round, a budget line, a person pressing the button. Stopping it takes a decision too, and that one has no brief, no approval and no meeting. It only takes someone paying attention, and July is the month the region's attention goes to the beach.

So the ad runs. The platform does what it was told, which was to spend. The money leaves every morning at the rate it was set to leave, buying clicks to a page that says the thing is over.

A campaign does not need anyone to decide to keep spending. It only needs nobody to decide to stop, and in July nobody is exactly who is in the office.