The account I kept rebuilding

For years I used the empty weeks to rebuild advertising accounts, and I had it wrong.

August was the obvious window. Nobody was asking for anything, volumes were soft enough that a bad fortnight would go unremarked, and the account was untidy the way every live account is untidy: things built for reasons nobody remembers, overlapping audiences, a shape that grew rather than got designed. So I would consolidate. Merge the duplicates, remove what looked redundant, put the whole thing into one clean structure a new person could read in minutes.

It felt like the responsible use of a quiet month. It also looked like work when there was none.

Then the season would arrive and the account would meet it as a beginner. Everything a live account knows, which audience buys at a sane cost, which placement quietly drains money, what an ordinary Tuesday looks like, was held in the parts I had just merged out of existence. Costs climb back to where they were a year earlier. The team pays tuition, in the busiest weeks it has, on things the untidy version already knew.

None of that landed in my August. It landed in somebody else's September, and by then it read as a market getting harder.

I still tidy accounts. I do it inside a slow quarter, one change at a time, with the old shape running alongside the new until the new one has earned the traffic. It is slower and far less satisfying.

The tidying was never for the account. It was for me, because a clean account is a pleasant thing to open and an untidy one feels like an accusation. The bill for that comfort came due in the season, and it was paid by people who had not agreed to pay it.