The ad break people watch

For thirty nights in Egypt the ad break is not the price of the programme. It is part of it.

The room stays. Nobody stands up, nobody reaches for a second screen. The ads get discussed while they are still running, and by the time the episode comes back they have been put in an order by people who do not work in advertising and are not customers of most of what they just watched.

I have spent my working life buying a way past somebody. A skip button, a scroll, a thumb already moving. This is the one month, in the one market, where the attention is offered rather than taken.

Which quietly changes what the work is up against.

For the other eleven months my competition is the content. The thing the person came for, and my job is to be tolerable on the way to it. Here the content is the reason the room is sitting there, and the ads are compared with each other, in the same break, out loud, by a family with an opinionated uncle in it.

Almost nobody briefs for that. The work gets judged against last year's version of itself, in a meeting, one ad at a time on one screen. The audience judges it against the four that ran beside it tonight.

And the invitation has terms in it. The room came for the ad and not for the offer. A brand that uses the slot to announce a price has behaved like the guest who arrived at dinner with a brochure: not resented, exactly, just moved down the list of people anybody is pleased to see.

Everyone can name the ads they liked this month. They can also name which companies were selling at them, and the plan has no line for that.