I often reminisce about my agency days. Late nights, chilling with the creative team, brainstorming, and the sheer pace at which we produced work. This is about a time I had what I still think was a genuinely good idea. It was about summer and money. And it was so grilled that by the time it was served, the audience was full.
Campaigns work best when served hot. Especially in summer.
A simple idea about summer
The client was a large bank. The product was a multi-currency card. The kind you load before a holiday so you're not quietly bleeding money on exchange rates.
It wasn't a complicated insight, which is usually a sign it's the right one.
Summer means travel. Travel means foreign exchange spending.
People would spend money in other currencies whether we ran a campaign or not. All we had to do was nudge. Be there at the moment they were booking flights and thinking about baggage allowances. Remind them there was a smarter way to carry their money.
The drill was simple. Build the model. Look at the seasonality. Team it up with hardcore data. And I had a line I was fond of. The campaign was going to tell people not to let their wallet feel the heat this summer.
I thought I was in extremely good shape.
Nobody said no
I felt client approval was a formality. But that's the thing with budget approvals.
They didn't reject it. They didn't refuse the campaign. They asked me something much harder to argue with.
Could you show us a bit more proof of concept?
So that's what I did. Not once, not twice, but thrice. Three rounds of discussion. And they were all reasonable, or at least that's what I thought at the time. They just wanted some level of certainty. If people are already spending, why do we need this campaign?
Summer would happen. People would travel. The exchange rates were not waiting for our slides.
It was never about a good idea or a bad idea. It was about each person justifying what they were approving.
By the time I had permission to spend the money, it was the middle of summer.
My summer campaign about not letting your wallet feel the heat had spent the entire spring in a meeting room. And my brain was feeling the heat.
What the number said
The campaign ran for two weeks. And guess what? It worked.
Spends on the card during those two weeks went up 20% compared to the rest of that summer. Twenty percent. In a fortnight.
I should have been happy. Instead I sat with a very uncomfortable thought.
What would that have looked like with the whole season?
The number didn't defend the process. It exposed it. Every round of proof made the idea look more certain and the outcome smaller. We spent the summer proving we deserved to be in it.
The deck and the customer
I've thought about this a lot since. Mostly because these days I'm often the one in the room asking for the proof.
And here's the thing. It isn't stupidity. Everyone in that room is being perfectly rational. Nobody gets fired for asking for more evidence. Nobody is blamed for the campaign that ran two weeks late. They're blamed for the one that ran on time and missed. The incentives are clear, and they all point to one more round.
But somewhere in there, we started confusing two different things.
The deck is for the room. The campaign is for the customer. One is built to survive scrutiny. The other is built to survive reality. We keep using the first to decide whether we're allowed to do the second. And reality has a calendar.
Digital makes this worse, not better. This is the part I think we get backwards. We have more data than ever, so we believe we can predict more precisely than ever. Within limits, we can.
But the things that actually move? A moment that catches. A message that lands. A piece of content that travels further than any model said it would. You cannot fully forecast those. You can make a well-informed guess with good data and real context. That is the job, and it is a skilled one.
What you cannot do is manufacture certainty about an unpredictable system by holding more meetings about it. The certainty doesn't exist. The meetings just move the cost.
Three things I carry
Let me be careful here, because the lazy version of this is "rigour bad, instinct good." That's nonsense. Rigour is why I got a 20% number instead of a hunch. If I'd been wrong, the model is what would have told me.
The mistake wasn't asking for proof. The mistake was asking for the same weight of proof on a two-week seasonal campaign as we'd ask on a core platform bet. Those are not the same decision. One is cheap and reversible. The other is neither. We reviewed them identically.
So, three things I've carried since.
Treat time as a cost. A real one. When a decision has a season attached, every review round has a price. Somebody should say that out loud in the room. Three extra weeks of confidence on a summer campaign costs you summer.
Match the scrutiny to what you can undo. Small, reversible, seasonal? Run it, measure it properly, learn fast. Large, structural, hard to reverse? Take all the rounds you need. Treating both the same way isn't caution. It's just uniformity wearing caution's clothes.
Be honest about what the model knows. I can tell you with real confidence that travel spending rises in summer. I cannot tell you which creative will catch. Dressing a good guess up as a forecast, because forecasts get approved and guesses don't, is how we end up defending a number we invented to a room that wanted a number.
The uncomfortable truth about digital is that you can be right, be prepared, be data-led, and still watch the thing succeed for reasons you didn't quite plan, at a scale you didn't quite predict. That isn't a failure of marketing. That's the medium.
The failure is spending the season proving you deserve to be in it.
My wallet never did feel the heat that summer. My timeline did.