A month on the fridge

The most-read piece of brand writing in this region this month is a table of numbers.

It is printing now, ahead of a month expected to begin around the eighteenth, depending on the sighting. Two columns, thirty rows, the times of the two moments that decide the day, city by city. A logo in a corner. Sometimes a phone number. Nothing else.

It goes on a fridge in Cairo under a magnet, or inside a kitchen cupboard door, and for thirty days a household of six looks at it twice a day. Every person in that house, at the two moments in the day when nobody is doing anything else, reading a document with a company's name on it.

Count the borrowed minutes on that. No campaign I have worked on has ever bought attention on those terms.

Then read what is on it. No adjective. No claim. No line about a commitment to family. No offer, no code, no instruction to visit anything. The logo is small and in the wrong place for advertising, which is the right place for a page that has to earn a spot on a fridge door.

The discipline in it is the discipline nobody wants. Every instinct in a marketing department is to add. Put the line under the times. Put the new product along the bottom. Make the logo bigger, since we are paying for the print anyway. Each of those additions is a reason the page comes off the fridge, and off the fridge it is thirty days of nothing.

A family will keep a page for a month if the page does a job for them every day of it. Everything a brand wants to say about itself is the first thing that would get it taken down.