Ramadan by the hour

The calls start in the first week of January.

Ramadan is expected around the start of March, depending on the sighting, which means briefs and media should already be locked, and for the large advertisers they were locked in the autumn. Annual deals signed, inventory chosen, the film cast before the weather changed. None of that is available now.

So a small advertiser reads the position as late, and there is a particular panic in the first weeks of the year that I have seen from the platform side many times. A founder with a real business and a small budget, asking what is left.

The honest answer is that the good inventory has gone and it was never the thing to buy.

The small accounts that do well in this month were never running a smaller version of the big campaign. What they buy differs in kind. They buy hours rather than weeks, and almost all of those hours sit after the fast breaks, when the household is awake, fed and holding a phone. They buy the last third of the month rather than the whole of it, because that is when the spending decisions get made. They keep the creative deliberately unfinished, because the start can move by a day on the sighting and a film locked in February cannot move with it.

None of that needs an autumn deal. It needs a decision about which hour matters and the discipline to spend nothing in the hours that do not.

The panic comes from the comparison. Measured against a campaign bought in October, a January decision looks like a failure before it starts. Measured as what it is, an hour-by-hour purchase in the one month whose attention runs to a timetable everybody knows in advance, it is a different instrument at a different price, and the advertiser buying it is not behind.