A wedding in the dead month

Every regional plan has the same shape in the middle of the year, and July is the flattest part of it.

The Gulf cities are emptied. The flights went out with the schools, spend is soft across most categories, and the month arrives on the chart as one low line that nobody in the room argues with.

Sit inside the line for a minute.

The schools being out is the reason a family can gather at all. The cousins fly in, the aunt from another country has three weeks, the brother who works abroad is home. So the summer here carries a wedding season, and almost everything a wedding needs is at its ceiling in the month the total calls dead. The good halls went first. The caterer is quoting for four hundred covers on a Thursday and wants the deposit this week.

A category total is an average, and an average is where two opposite facts go to cancel each other out. Most of a market at its floor, plus a smaller part of it at its ceiling, reads as a flat and uneventful month, and the flat uneventful month is what the phasing was built from.

What the businesses inside the peak have in common is a date, agreed months ago between two households, which does not move for anybody's media plan. The list of things still to be bought against that date is being worked through this week, by a family that set the money aside before the year began.

So the budget comes out of the one month in which the customer has a fixed deadline and the money already allocated, on the authority of a number that describes everybody else.

An average is not a level. It is a mix, and the plan reads it as a level.