The review with two columns

The annual review deck arrives from the agency this week, and it grades a year that was at least half mine.

One column. Performance against the plan, channel by channel, then a slide near the end about what could be stronger next year, worded so carefully that nobody in the room has to answer it. Every number in it true. Twelve months of work presented as though it had arrived in a sealed box from the client and left the building as advertising.

The second column holds my side of the year. The brief that changed in the third month, after production had been booked against the first version. The approval that took three weeks inside a campaign built to run for four. The budget that moved in the autumn to cover a shortfall somewhere else, with the target left exactly where it was. The eleven days it took to approve a response to a competitor's price cut, in a category where the cut was the news.

Nobody writes that column. The agency has all of it written down somewhere and cannot say it and keep the account. The client will not say it out loud with a supplier in the room, and never in front of a junior who will repeat it. So the hour goes on the parts of the year neither side controlled, the deck gets filed as the record, and the relationship renews on last year's grievances, unspoken, at a slightly better rate.

For years I read that hour as a verdict on the agency, and I was the client in most of those rooms.

Now the second column is mine to write, and I send it before their deck is finished. Six lines, with dates on them. Half of it is uncomfortable to put in writing, and it is the only version of that meeting where next year gets decided rather than described.