In her latest column, Shirley Marschall looks at the pitfalls of planning, and how Q4 goes from calm to chaos...

Every Q4 starts with a plan. Mine involved a move to a different country and three buckets: charity, trash or with me. Only the most important things make the trip. Very disciplined and very clear.

On the evening before the big move, I can report that the plan didn’t survive. I can also confidently predict that advertising’s Q4 plans are going to end in much the same way.

Turns out 'only what you absolutely need' is a highly elastic category. The car trunk is not...

My plan involved suitcases and carry-ons only. That was non-negotiable, until it wasn’t. Reality now involves suitcases, carry-ons, tote bags, shopping bags and an increasingly impressive collection of random bags, all of which now have to be carried into every hotel room along the way.

The plan was also for the dog to have the double back seat, including enough footwell space to sleep comfortably on or under the seat. Reality has given her one back seat, a stuffed footwell and five days of driving. She’ll be fine…

Then there was the absolute must-have: the back window had to stay free. Needless to say, that plan also went to trash. But who needs a back window when there's a dashboard and a backup camera to rely on?

None of this was particularly unexpected or the constraints a surprise. After all, I knew roughly how much stuff I had and the size of the car. And yet, somewhere between planning and packing, the definition of 'important' expanded much faster than the available space.

Q4 and a packed car share an astonishing number of house rules…

The first rule: everything becomes a must-have. 

By July, the plan is done. Budgets are set, campaigns booked, audiences mapped. There's time to move things around, room to test, adjust and reconsider. In late September, everything still fits, at least on paper. Constraints exist, but they're still somewhere in the theoretical distance.

And then Q4 begins.

The plan goes from calm to chaos in weeks, not months. Suddenly priorities expand to fill the budget available, and then some. There’s another audience to reach, a campaign to extend, a format to test and another performance target to hit. Something that was supposed to happen in September has moved to October, and an October campaign is now running into November.

Meanwhile, Black Friday, the holidays and the end of the year are approaching. And the retargeting pilot that was 'nice to have' in July is now 'critical to the holiday story.'

And then, on packing day, someone always turns up with one more item, delivered with the words: 'It’s small.' Mine was a lamp. In Q4, the lamp is a calendar invite from someone senior, titled 'quick add.'

The second rule: whatever you plan first ends up at the bottom.

Anyone who has loaded a car knows that whatever goes in first ends up underneath everything else. And it’s always the thing you need on day one: the charger at the bottom. The original brief is down there too, along with the measurement approach and the tidy hypothesis from before Q4. They're all buried underneath a pile of things that arrived in October marked urgent. Reaching them means unloading everything else, which nobody has time for. So they stay put and become a next-year-problem that everyone agrees to look at in January.

The third rule: every addition makes sense on its own.

Every plan adjustment has a reason (or at least a convincing explanation). And it’s rarely one obviously terrible decision that creates a mess. More like a collection of little decisions that eventually have to fit into the same finite 3-month space.

The same thing happens further down the ad tech stack. An extra SSP path goes in for reach. The deal nobody wants stays live. Another format is added because there is still inventory to fill. MFA-adjacent inventory arrives because scale now matters more than anything. 

By November, the original plan, minus the breathing room, gives way to speed. Now, just like during the last 48 hours of packing, sorting stops, and loading begins. After that anything within arm's reach starts looking necessary.

The temptation, of course, is to keep adding things anyway (which is exactly how the dog lost the footwell) and how a carefully packed car ends up with bags on and under the seats that apparently can’t be left behind. And it’s how a carefully constructed Q4 plan ends up looking very different from the one that existed in July.

But in the end, there are only so many impressions, days, dollars, and people to go around, regardless of how many things suddenly become essential.

The industry knows this and between Q1 and Q3, there is plenty of talk about efficiency, simplification, fewer hops, cleaner supply paths, and doing more with less. Then Q4 arrives with its pressure and deadlines, and 'less' starts negotiating with 'just in case.'

In my case, 'just in case' clearly won, which is more or less how my car looks right now.