28 January 2026

Delivered is not displayed, and displayed is not read

Vendor rows labelled “delivered” often mean accepted by an operating system. Whether a person saw the shade is a later, messier fact in push notification analytics.

Notebooks during a meeting where delivery definitions are being argued

We still meet slides that treat delivered, displayed, and opened as a polite staircase. On iOS, a delivery can sit unseen in a stack. On Android, a high-priority service message may peek into the shade and count as a display the person never chose.

When we review a programme, we ask for the vendor’s definition sheet, not the pretty column names in the weekly file. If the sheet does not exist, the first finding writes itself: you are reporting a staircase nobody specified.

The useful discipline is to pick one row for leadership — usually displayed, if you can get it — and to keep opened in a footnote until copywriters and engineers mean the same tap. That argument is exactly what the event-naming workshop is for.