The campaign from the founding year

In most accounts that have been running more than three years there is one campaign nobody touches.

It has the original name, usually with the founding year still in it. Its structure is wrong by every current practice, its audience was built by hand, and its creative is the film from the first launch, with the old logo on it. It is also the campaign that built the business, and everyone in the room knows it.

Look at what it costs now, not what it cost then. On the accounts I have seen from the platform side, the cost per result on the founding campaign is usually one nobody would tolerate from anything launched last month. Put those numbers in a new build and it would be paused within a fortnight.

It never gets paused. It gets protected, the way a first employee gets protected. The review moves down the list, arrives at it, somebody says that one has always worked, and the list moves on. The founder does not want to be the person who turned it off. The agency does not want to be the one who suggested it.

What is being protected is not performance. It is a year when the whole thing was fragile and that campaign was the reason it survived. The debt is real. It is owed to people, and it is being paid to a line in an advertising account.

A campaign has no memory. It does not know it saved the company, it cannot be loyal in return, and it will keep taking budget for as long as budget is pointed at it.

The accounts that keep growing are the ones where the oldest campaign sits on the list with everything else, judged on this month, not on the year it saved.