No occasion to lean on

This is the first Friday in about six weeks with nothing on it.

For a month and a half the calendar wrote the opening line of every message a brand sent here. The month starting. Its first Friday. The middle stretch. The last ten nights. Eid, depending on the sighting. Mother's Day, the Saturday after it. Nobody had to decide what to say, because the date said it, and the only work left was the artwork.

Now a Friday like this one arrives and there is nothing at the top of the brief.

You can hear what follows in the feed. A photograph with the word Friday laid over it. A greeting for a day that is not a day. A discount with no reason behind it, which is the most expensive sentence in marketing, because it has to buy the minute with money instead of with meaning. Or silence, for a fortnight, until the next date on the grid arrives and there is something to hold on to again.

An occasion is a borrowed first line. It is useful, and it is borrowed, and the cost of borrowing is that a brand can go a whole year without ever writing one of its own.

Somebody gave that minute to the message either way. On an occasion the minute was already being spent on the occasion, and the brand only had to stand near it and be recognised. On a quiet Friday the minute has to be earned by the sentence, by a person, on a keyboard, with nothing on the calendar helping.

Six weeks of borrowed openings. Today the first line has to come from inside the building.