A holiday without a default

Saudi Arabia has two national days and only one of them has a template.

September has the green, the flag, the crowds and a couple of decades of brand work to borrow from. A junior designer can build that post in an afternoon and nobody in the approval chain will be able to say it is wrong.

Founding Day is on Saturday and it has none of that. It is only a few years old, and it points a long way back, close to three centuries, to the founding of the first Saudi state rather than to the modern kingdom. Different century, different clothes, different music, different story.

So most brands will take the September asset, change the colours, change the date and run it.

Call that laziness if you like. It is closer to fear, and the fear is rational. A day about where a country came from is a day you can get publicly wrong, and the safest wrong answer is the one that looks like everybody else's wrong answer. Nobody has ever been called into a meeting over a post that resembled the market.

But a default is only what happens when nobody decides. September's default was written by the first brands that turned up and kept turning up, and by now it is inherited rather than chosen. This one has not been written yet. It is being written this year and next, by whoever does the least lazy thing available to them.

Which makes it the one identity moment on the regional calendar where a brand still gets to choose its posture instead of receiving it. The brands recolouring September are not avoiding a mistake. They are handing the day to whoever writes it in their place.