Halfway is the end

It is the thirtieth of June. Egypt marks an anniversary, finance closes a half, and somewhere this week a marketing team sits down to review the six months behind it and plan the six it thinks are left.

For years I ran that meeting on the calendar finance gave me. January to December, a midpoint at the end of June, two halves of one year. I had it wrong, and it took a few Gulf summers to see why.

The marketing year here begins in September, when the cities fill back up and the schools open. It runs through the promotional season in November, a December that belongs to the UAE more than to anyone else, a Ramadan that arrives about eleven days earlier each year, and the Eid that follows it. Then the second Eid, then the roads to the coast, then nothing. By the end of June the year is finished. July and August are the gap between one year and the next, whatever the accounts call them.

Which means the meeting this week is misnamed. What is being held is the annual review, in the off-season, while half the room is packing.

The name matters because of what the meeting produces. Call it a half-year review and it produces a patch: six months of target left, so six months of catch-up, phased across a summer that cannot carry it and a September that has to carry everything. The number is rescued on paper by October and nobody in the room believes it in July.

Call it what it is and it produces a plan. A whole one, for a whole year, starting in September, with the summer in front of it as the one stretch of the calendar when there is time to build anything.

The accounts say the year is half over. The market says it has ended, and a new one is waiting on the other side of the holiday.