When they ask for a report

The tell is not silence. It is the shape of the request changing.

An advertiser on the way out stops asking for changes. No new audience, no argument about a rejected asset, no request to try something small. What arrives instead is a request for a report. A full one, six months if possible, broken out by channel, and the message is more polite than anything they have sent all year.

There is also a name copied in that has not been on a message before.

August brings more of these than any other fortnight, because the Gulf is away and the request comes from whoever is at a desk, which is rarely the person who has been running the account.

Read what is being asked for. Not information. They have the dashboard, and nothing in it has moved since last month. Somebody is being made to justify a line inside their own business, by a person who did not choose it, and the deck is evidence in an argument that started somewhere else.

By the time the report is requested the decision is usually old. It was taken in a room with a budget in it, and the channel was on a list of things to look at again.

The reply that would help is not a report. It is one question: what changed on your side, who is asking, and what would the answer have to look like for this to stay.

Almost nobody asks it. The deck takes an afternoon and feels like service. The question takes a minute and may come back with the news that you are already the line under review, which is why the afternoon wins.