The chairman's road

Every media plan I have worked on had one line nobody argued about.

It is outdoor. Usually a single site, sometimes two, on the airport road or the ring road or whichever stretch the owner of the business drives twice a day. The cost sits oddly next to everything around it. The reach number attached to it has been assembled backwards, from the price, by whoever needed a defensible figure in the column.

Everyone in the room knows what the line is for. Nobody says it out loud, so it gets discussed in the vocabulary of coverage and frequency, which is the one vocabulary in which it makes no sense at all.

Calling it waste misses what it does. It is a purchase, and the thing being purchased is the confidence of the family that owns the company. Somebody in that family will be asked at a wedding, by a cousin with opinions about the business, whether they are doing anything at the moment. A site on the road that cousin also drives is an answer. It buys a year of not being second-guessed, which is worth a great deal to a marketing director who wants to run anything at all.

What is dishonest is the reach number.

So now I put the line on the plan and I name it. One site, priced, described as what it is: presence on the road that matters to the owners. Then the rest of the plan is built for the customer, with numbers that are actually about the customer, and the two do not have to argue with each other.

A status purchase allowed to be a status purchase costs a site. Dressed up as performance, it costs the argument as well.