The free weeks in the deal

The bonus weeks in an annual media deal are always in the summer, and it is worth sitting with the reason they were available to give away.

The deal is signed in December. The negotiation is about the whole year, and value is being counted in weeks of exposure. The seller cannot move the rate very far without damaging every other conversation, so the seller adds volume instead: extra weeks, a second site, an upweight, at no cost. Both sides leave with something they can defend internally. The buyer has bought the year for less per week. The seller has protected the card.

The weeks land in June, July and August, because those are the weeks the seller could not sell.

So the brand runs them. Not because now is when the customer is deciding, but because the weeks exist, they are already paid for in a sense nobody can quite locate, and letting them lapse would look like waste to whoever negotiated them. Autumn creative goes out early, into a city that has flown out. The residents who stayed see the same execution for two months. By the time the real launch arrives, the freshest thing the brand owns is already tired to the only people who were here to see it.

Free to buy is not free to run. The cost is paid in a currency that is not on the invoice: the wear on the creative, the frequency landing on whoever stayed, and the fact that the schedule was set by the party holding unsold inventory rather than by anyone thinking about a customer.

I have stopped counting bonus weeks as a win in the negotiation. They are the seller's quiet months, handed across the table, and they still have to be earned or refused.