The August deck

Friday note. The first fourth-quarter plan of the year arrives in the first week of September, and it was written in August by the most junior person on the account.

It has to be. Every August the Gulf is away until the second half of the month, and the agency floor is a graduate, an account executive and whoever could not get leave. So the person who has spent the summer inside the reports writes the plan.

I have sat on that floor, and I have read what comes out of it.

The August deck is unpolished. It says the spring campaign did not work and gives the reason, because the person writing it pulled the numbers and has not yet learned which numbers are impolite. It puts the media that underperformed on the same page as the media that was the director's idea. Nobody has told it what the client wants to hear, because nobody senior has been there to tell it.

It is usually the truest document the client sees all year.

By October it has been through three seniors. Each one is protecting something, a relationship, a budget line, a decision made in the spring, and each adds a layer of defence: a reason the campaign was a learning, a softer word for stopped, a slide that moves the director's idea into a section called foundations. It has been made safe, and safe is what seniority is paid for.

The client sees the October version. The August version lives on a shared drive under a name like draft v1, and nobody measures the distance between the two.

The August deck is worth reading before the October one exists. Honesty in this business has a seniority ceiling, and it is set in the second half of the month, when everyone comes back.