The share you do not sign

The mistake looks like good procurement at the time.

The annual media deal is on the table in October. The seller wants the year, the discount for committing all of it is real, and the finance director likes a number that is fixed in advance. So the whole budget is signed, twelve months of it, against a plan written before anyone knew what next year would look like.

Then January arrives with three things.

The Ramadan brief, which wants a different channel from the one the contract bought, because the idea that survived the review needs to live somewhere the deal does not cover. A creator who broke through over the winter, whose audience is exactly the customer, and who was on no plan in October because nobody had heard of them. And a channel that quietly moved, where the cost of a customer fell while the contract kept paying for the one where it rose.

All three need money. The money has been spent. Not gone, but committed to a schedule that was agreed before any of the three existed.

I have watched teams try to unpick this in February, and the seller is polite and immovable, because the discount was the price of immovability. That was the deal. The buyer took it.

An annual deal is a sunk decision the moment it is signed. Whatever the market does afterwards, the money goes where the signature said, and every conversation about the three new things becomes a conversation about what to cancel.

The share you leave unsigned is worth more than the discount on the share you commit, and the difference is not small. The signed share can only do what October thought was right. The unsigned share is the only part of next year's plan that can still learn anything.