Use it or lose it

There is a line in every budget that sits untouched from January to October and gets spent in six weeks.

Everyone in the building knows why. If it is not spent by the year end it disappears, and next year's number starts from what was spent, not from what was asked for. So in the last weeks of the year the money goes out: media booked without a brief, a production nobody asked for in March, an agency told to find something, anything, that can invoice before the thirty-first.

Use it or lose it is the most manufactured deadline in any company I have worked in or with. Nothing happens in the market on the last day of a fiscal year. No household in Riyadh or Cairo is waiting for a company's accounts to close so that it can be sold to more urgently.

And yet the customer receives it. A December of ads with nothing to say, from a brand that had eleven months to say something. What the customer was handed was noise, and noise is what a brand is remembered for in January.

The finance rule will not change. It exists for reasons that have nothing to do with marketing, and the people who defend it will outlast any campaign.

What can change is when the decision gets made. Not in November, when the only question left is what can be spent fastest, but now, in August, when the last third of the year is still empty and the money still has a choice about what it is for. Written down, with a month against every part of it, so that December is the end of a plan and not the emptying of a line.

A budget decided in August has somewhere to go in December. A budget left to the rule has only the thirty-first.

The fiscal year is a deadline the customer has never heard of. August is the month that keeps it that way.