The size of the box

In the week before Eid, which is expected at the end of the month, the boxes go out. Dates, chocolate, a card with a name on it, a driver with a list on the passenger seat and a route through three business districts.

The boxes are not the same size.

Somebody chose that, in an afternoon, and almost always from the billing table, because the billing table is the only ranking of clients an agency keeps that nobody inside it argues with. Large for the top rows. Medium for the middle. Whatever is left in the store cupboard for the accounts signed in March.

Then the boxes land in open offices, on desks, next to the box the agency sent a different client in the same industry. Marketing people move between brands and talk to each other constantly. A client whose box came a size smaller than last year has just been told something the quarterly review took care not to say.

None of it is dishonest. An agency does rank its clients by what they are worth to it, and it should.

What it forgets is that once a year it delivers the ranking, by driver, to every client on the list.