The first request of the year

The first request to reach a marketing budget in a new year is almost never from marketing.

It is a promise. Somebody senior spent December at dinners, at a conference, at a distributor's end-of-year event, and said yes to something. A retailer was told there would be support behind the new listing. A partner was told about a joint activation in the spring. A sponsorship was agreed at a table where nobody had the annual plan open. None of it was written down. All of it is real now, and it needs a line.

So the year opens with a claim on money that has not been allocated yet, and the claim arrives with a name attached that makes it awkward to refuse.

By the time the plan is presented in the second week, three or four of these have landed. Each one was cheap to agree to over dinner and expensive to fund in February. The sheet was never blank. It was presented as blank, which is a different thing, and the difference is the part of the budget the marketer never actually gets to decide.

I list them before I plan anything now. Not to fight them, because most are worth keeping and a promise to a distributor is a relationship with a number on it. But a promise discovered in March gets funded out of whatever is left, and whatever is left is usually the only line that was doing any long work.

The year therefore starts with less than the total on the slide, and the difference was committed in December, by people who do not think of themselves as spending marketing money.