Who named the ads

Friday note. Open an advertising account that has been running for years and read the names in the order they were made.

The bottom layer belongs to an agency. Six segments between underscores, a market code, a quarter, a campaign number from a planning system nobody in the building can log into any more. Disciplined, unreadable, and it stops on a date.

Above it, the founder's layer. Lower case, no dates, the video called after the person who is in it, the one called the good one.

Above that, whoever holds the account now. A prefix, a date, an audience, a version number, written by somebody who has been asked what changed once too often.

Nobody ever handed this account over. Each set of hands started a new layer on top of the last one, and every layer is still sitting there, because deleting somebody else's naming means understanding it first.

What I read the layers for is the date at the top. The newest name is a timestamp on the last moment a person made a decision in there. Not logged in. Not looked at a chart. Decided something, and had to type a name for it.

In a fortnight when the whole region is supposedly away, that timestamp settles a question that would otherwise take a meeting and two polite emails. If the top layer is from Tuesday, the account is being worked. If the top layer is from June, it is being watched.

An account does not really have an owner. It has a most recent one, and the names are the only place that is written down.