Divided by twelve

Everyone in the room knows July and August are dead in the Gulf. The exodus started with the Eid last week, and it will be in full flow once the schools close. Nobody at the table would argue with that.

Then someone opens the budget, and the year is in twelve equal columns.

I have sat in that meeting from three seats: the agency spending the money, the brand that owned it, and the platform watching it arrive. The annual number gets agreed in the autumn. The template has twelve months across the top. Someone types in the total, divides by twelve, and the phasing is done. Not decided. Done, because dividing by twelve is what a spreadsheet does when nobody tells it otherwise.

From that moment the summer miss is scheduled. July comes in under, August comes in under, and in September there is a variance meeting to explain why. The explanation is the heat, the holidays, the customer being in London. All of it true. All of it known in January.

The same people who cannot be surprised by a Gulf summer are surprised by it in that meeting, every year, on a schedule.

Phasing looks like a clerical step. In a market with a calendar like this one, phasing is the decision. Twelve equal months is a forecast that August will behave like October, and everyone signing it knows that forecast is false. Ramadan moves. National Day sits in September. Riyadh's season opens in the autumn and changes what attention costs for five months. None of that survives a division by twelve.

The flat line is the one claim in the whole plan that nobody argued for, and it is wrong in a way everyone could see in January.

A budget that ignores the calendar it will be spent in has chosen to be wrong on a schedule. The September meeting is just the day the schedule arrives.