Day one is mid-season

Nothing starts in Riyadh today. The outdoor tables are full, the weather is the best it will be all year, and the season that filled them opened back in October.

The first of January is an accounting event. Nothing about it belongs to the customer.

Read the year the way the customer lives it and it runs from the season opening in the autumn to Ramadan, which is expected around the start of March. On that clock today is not the beginning of anything. It sits past the middle of the busiest stretch this city has, with the back half still to run.

Now look at what a plan built on the calendar year does with today. Today is month one, and month one is for setting up: the briefing, the creative development, the first internal review. The launch lands in March or April, because that is where a build-up puts it, and a campaign meant to introduce a brand to a full city arrives to a half-empty one, in the heat, after the month that reorganises everybody's spending.

Then the plan reaches the autumn, and the autumn is month ten. Month ten is the thin part of the curve, the part that was left over after the launch. So the money is at its lowest in the week the city goes back outside and the whole thing begins again.

The error is not in the forecast. It is in treating the first of a month as a starting line when the customer's year has its own edges, and none of them falls today. Every market I work in has those edges. Not one of them was drawn by a finance calendar.