arXiv2026
An ad break in a live stream is a hard deadline. Once a cue arrives, the ad path has seconds to produce a state the player can use, and starting that work earlier buys time while giving the prepared state longer to expire before the break. Comparing trigger policies means scoring which of these happened; the records easiest to collect do not. We separate trigger, reach, readiness, playback, billability and measurement in an observed-event ledger, fix the reference-deadline rule before candidates are assigned, and account for contribution over every planned break-session pair, reached or not. Readiness means the declared state is valid at that deadline. We prove when scoring completion by the deadline instead reverses a policy comparison: for monotone playback with a shared latency law, a fixed state lifetime and common coefficients, the reversal occurs when the earlier policy's extra trigger cost falls between its validity gain and its completion gain. A synthetic study of 45,000 scripted sessions matches this condition on monotone paths, a check of its generator, and, outside its assumptions, finds the same reversal in mixtures with restarts, seeks, late joins and pauses. Playhead summaries misclassify up to 41% of reach indicators yet reverse no comparison in the study: maximum-position errors cancel exactly, and terminal-position errors change only magnitudes. Completion scoring reverses the comparison in three of nine short-lifetime conditions, all at the one latency setting where the proved condition holds. The evidence is synthetic by design; code, seeds and event histories are public.