Where the agency went

Every July a client somewhere decides to save money by going quiet. Nothing is briefed, nothing is booked, the retainer is paused or the monthly is trimmed, and the account goes to sleep until September.

From the client's chair this looks free. Nothing is happening, so nothing is being paid for.

From inside an agency it looks different. I started on that side, and the thing nobody tells a client is that an agency does not have a bench. It has people, and people go where the work is. When the briefs stop, a planner does not sit at a desk waiting for them to come back. They are moved, that afternoon, to whatever is live.

In July, what is live is new business. The pitches that fill the autumn are written in the dead month, and they are written by whoever is not busy. So the best planner on the quiet account spends July on a pitch, and if the pitch wins, she is on the new account by September. Nobody decided to take her off the old one. It happened by default, one week at a time.

The client comes back in September with the autumn brief and finds a new face across the table. The account director is the same, the logo on the deck is the same, and the person who knew why last year's plan looked the way it did is on another floor working on somebody else's brand.

Then the client says the agency has lost its way, and starts thinking about a pitch of their own.

The account was not lost in the autumn. It was lost in July, in the month it cost nothing.

An account with no briefs is free for a month and expensive for a year. The price of the free month is the team, and the team was the only thing ever being bought.