The new pin inherits everything

From the platform side you can often see a second branch open before the street does.

A campaign set appears that is an exact copy of an existing one, with a single thing changed: the pin on the map. Everything else comes across whole. The audience built out of two years of buyers who live on the other side of the city. The exclusion list, grown one complaint at a time. The daily budget that took two years of arguing to justify. The creative that won on a street which already knew the name above the door.

On paper that is a head start. In practice the branch opens two years old, in a neighbourhood it has never met, answering questions nobody there has asked.

Its audience is a portrait of another postcode. Its exclusions hide the exact people it most needs to learn from, because somebody else found them expensive. Its budget is large enough to absorb a bad fortnight, which is another way of saying large enough to hide one until the review.

The first branch did not begin like this. It began with a small budget, a radius you could walk, one offer, and somebody who could see the door while the money was running. Every setting in that account is a scar from a specific week on a specific street.

Those settings are the first branch's biography. They are not instructions for anywhere else.

What is worth copying from a first location is not where it ended up. It is how it behaved when it knew nothing: cheap enough to be wrong, small enough to notice, close enough to the door to hear the answer.