The Unlikely Friendship

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Teena walked into marketing with a laptop full of spreadsheets and the quiet certainty that numbers would save the day.
For her, receipts were truth; policies were maps; deviations were red flags.
She trimmed expense lines like a gardener prunes a hedge—neat, necessary, relentless.
Dev arrived like a gust; loud laugh, quick fixes, a list of favors scribbled on napkins.
To Teena, his booking habits looked like waste.
To Dev, they were leverage—small costs turned into media moments.

They clashed, naturally.
He booked an influencer in Lagos without invoice; she flagged it within a day.
He shrugged and called it “momentum”; she called it “audit risk.”
Their meetings became heat maps of tension—voices high, silence sharp.
Then the CFO asked for an audit after a campaign underperformed.
Panic spread like a virus across the floor.

Teena stayed late that Friday and began to run the numbers properly, the kind of deep checks she loved.
She built a timeline, mapped travel dates to content timestamps, ran a simple A/B comparison: teams with influencer-driven activations versus standard ads.
Baseline conversion for the campaign was 0.8 percent; in the influencer cohort it rose to 2.8 percent.
That was about a 250 percent lift, she noted, and then she frowned because the costs looked ugly on paper.
She ran a marginal ROI calc next: media value earned minus direct spend; the initial result was red.

Near midnight Dev showed up with stale coffee but steady eyes.
“Show me.”
She showed him the worksheets, the pivot tables, the messy notes.
He pointed at a cluster of dates she had ignored, moments where a vendor credited service after a private dinner.
He described, in quick, imperfect grammar, how he swapped an upgrade for two extra campaign days, how a producer got a favor that later turned into exclusive pickup.
He kept a notebook of relationships not receipts.

“You make it sound like gambling,” she said.
“I make it feel like calculated risk,” he answered.

They did data then, together, but it wasn't sterile.
She added columns for “earned media value” and “influencer velocity”—a rough score Dev had been sketching for months.
He taught her the ledger of favors: vendor_credit, barter_value, goodwill_index—words that looked informal until she converted them into numbers.
They created a new metric: adjusted net impact = (direct conversions + estimated earned media conversions) - net spend, and ran it across three regional activations.

The results were messy but real.
One activation had a direct sales lift of 14 percent and an estimated media value equal to 60 percent of the headline cost.
Another showed high engagement but low conversion; the third was a clear win—3x baseline conversion with vendor credits covering 22 percent of costs.
When Teena re-ran the ROI with those adjusted inputs, two of the three activations moved from red to green.
She felt the spreadsheet breathe.

They agreed to an experiment.
Dev would keep his flexibility; Teena would require upfront tagging and a capped “pilot allowance” per trip.
Every activation needed a post-campaign reconciliation with both hard receipts and soft-metric notes—screenshots, links, mentions, timestamps.
If the pilot failed to clear the pre-set ROI threshold, Dev would account for the variance personally.

The first full cycle tested the protocol and it mostly worked.
Metrics that mattered: reach, engagement rate, conversions, cost per acquisition.
They also tracked “virality events”—moments when earned content led to pickups by local stations—coded as binary variables and tallied.
Across six pilot trips, average engagement rose 2.1x, conversions averaged +65% relative lift versus control, and the department’s unexplained variance dropped 43 percent.
Those numbers pleased finance because tidy numbers make decisions easier.

Small changes followed fast.
Dev started keeping receipts and tagging campaign codes; Teena added “soft credits” columns in the master workbook; finance accepted a structured flexible fund with oversight.
The CFO stopped breathing down every week.
Auditors smiled when they saw the reconciliation templates.

Outside the desk, the war softened into late lunches and short jokes.
They argued less about principle and more about thresholds, pivot tables, and whether “viral” could be predicted.
Teena laughed one afternoon when she found a scribbled line in Dev’s notebook: “favors = low cost high trust.”
Numbers and people, both matter now.

Rain hit the window as they left the office the day the policy passed.
Dev nudged her and said, “We make a mean spreadsheet.”
She didn’t correct him.
Rules plus gumption, models plus mess—somewhere between the cells they found respect, and then, a friendship no audit could measure.

I invite @mr-peng @imohmitch @us-andrew to participate in this contest.