The retainer needs a brief

I have taken this call from the agency side of the desk, and it arrives every June with the same first sentence in it.

We are paying you anyway, so what can we run over the summer.

It is asked in good faith. The fee is committed for the year, the market is about to empty, the client would rather have something than nothing, and nobody wants to be the person who spent three months producing no work. It sounds like the responsible question.

Then look at the brief that follows it.

There is no customer in it, because the customer has left the country. There is no job in it, because nothing has to happen in July that could not happen in October. There is a channel, usually social. There is a volume, usually a number of posts a month. There is a tone, usually light. The one thing the document really contains is a fee that has already been paid, and every line in it is there to justify the fee.

That is the worst brief of the year to be handed, and it comes from the client trying hardest to be fair.

What happens next is well practised on both sides. A theme gets invented. Something summery. The work goes out into an emptied feed, earns what an emptied feed pays, and appears in a September review as activity. Everybody has been busy and nothing has been decided.

A fee already spent is not a reason to make anything. It is only the reason the making feels free.

The conversation worth having this month is the other one: what September actually needs, what has to be true before the schools go back, and whether two quiet months can be spent building that instead of filling them.