The old pack in the film

Production month, so the shoots are running, and on most of them the hero product on the table is last year's pack.

It is not carelessness. The new pack is a print order sitting in a queue; nothing exists yet except a proof and a rendering. The film has a booked studio, a booked crew and a delivery date set by the media, and no shoot has ever waited for packaging.

So the film gets made with what is in the cupboard. Sometimes that is a mock-up with the new front panel taped on, which reads fine in a wide shot and reads as a taped mock-up the moment the camera moves in. Usually it is simply last year's design, on the reasoning that the customer will not notice.

The customer does not notice in the way a brand team fears. Nobody writes in. What happens is smaller and more expensive: the ad and the shelf stop confirming each other. The person standing in the aisle with the ad somewhere in their memory has to do one extra half-second of work to decide that this box is that box, and in a month when the whole category is talking at once, that half-second is the entire job of the pack.

Two calendars run this. Marketing works back from the first night. Supply chain works forward from a printer's lead time. Both are correct inside their own document, and neither document has the aisle in it.

The customer is the only person in the chain who sees the film and the fridge on the same day.