Sent from an empty office

Every Mother's Day the message goes out at nine in the morning, and nobody sends it.

It was scheduled two or three weeks ago by a person who is at her own mother's table this morning. The designer who made the artwork is in a car on a road out of the city. The manager who approved it has his phone face down somewhere in a full room. The office has been empty since Thursday, and with Eid a day or two back, parts of it have been empty for longer than that.

So the only account speaking to mothers today that is not sitting in a mother's house is the brand.

It shows. The line was written on an ordinary working afternoon by someone thinking about approval deadlines and leave dates, which is the right thing to be thinking about on an ordinary working afternoon and the wrong place to write this from.

Empathy in a brief is usually handled as research. Who is she, what does she want, what does she respond to. Today it is not research. Everyone in the chain is living the day the copy is about. They wrote it a fortnight before they were living it, and none of the day was in the room with them.

The version that knows this is short. It does not explain what mothers deserve. It does not ask for a purchase before lunch. It reads like something written by a person who put their phone face down on a table in a full house and picked it up for ten seconds.

On the one day of the year when the team and the audience are doing exactly the same thing, the brand is the only one not in the room.