The rate card has seasons

A production crew costs less this week than it will in October, and nobody publishes that anywhere.

The good ones have a season like everything else. The editor whose cuts do not need fixing. The photographer who can shoot a menu in a day and make the food look like the food. The creator whose audience buys rather than watches. In the emptiest weeks of the year they answer on the first ring, hold a date on a handshake, and quote a number they would be embarrassed to quote in November. Six weeks from now the same names are booked through the peak, quoting a premium, and free only on the days nobody wants.

Most teams buy them in the order the campaign calendar suggests. Brief in September. Concepts through October. Production in the first week of November, for a season that opens on the eleventh. That sequence is tidy, defensible, and the most expensive order available, because every hour of it is bought at the top of the curve.

The confusion is about what a booking is for. What it buys is a date, and the date is the only part of the whole exercise that cannot be created later at any price. Three shooting days, a fortnight of editing, two creators in the categories that carry every season: all of it can be held now against a rough shape, and the shape is allowed to change afterwards.

The largest cost decisions of the season are not taken in the season. They are taken in the empty weeks, by whoever asked for a date before they had an idea, and they buy the same work with the cheapest money of the year.