The easiest money of the year

The easiest money a marketing team will ever be given is asked for around the second week of this month.

The request goes up in the afternoon and comes back approved that evening. No deck. No incrementality argument. No question about what the last one returned. The same request in a quiet month takes four weeks, a business case and two meetings, and comes back at half.

Nothing changed about the arithmetic. What changed is that the people approving it are living inside the month. They break their fast in front of the same television as the customer. Their family group has been forwarding the same films all week. Their children have a view on which brand made the good one. This is the only month of the year when a senior approver is also a heavy consumer of the category they are funding, and can see whether the brand is there.

So money is released in proportion to how visible the month is to the person signing, not in proportion to what the month returns. Both halves of that are worth knowing.

The first half is leverage. If a case has to be made for a category the board does not personally use, it gets made in the weeks when they use it, and the number asked for should be the year's number, not the month's.

The second half is the cost. Money that arrives the same evening arrives with no plan attached to it. It goes to whatever can absorb it in two days, which means weight on an auction already at its most expensive, behind creative made five weeks ago by whoever was awake.

A top-up is not a budget. It is a budget arriving in the one week of the year when it buys the least.