The brief said Ramadan

Thirty nights of advertising have just finished, and a great deal of it was the same three colours and the same lantern.

The easy reading is that the region's creative departments are short of imagination. I have sat in enough of them to know that is not true. The people who made that work can write.

Look at what they were handed.

The brief said Ramadan. It said the month, the dates, the media, the deliverables, the mandatory logos, the tone words: warm, generous, together. It said the objective in the language of the annual plan. What it did not say, anywhere on the page, was who the work was for. Not a segment. A person. One person, with an age, a city, a job, a kitchen, and a reason to be holding a phone at eleven at night.

When nobody names that person, the work still has to be made, and something has to fill the frame. What fills it is the occasion, because the occasion is the only thing in the brief that can be drawn.

So the lantern arrives. The crescent. The long table. The colours the month is agreed to be. Not because anybody chose them, but because they are what is left in the room after the brief has been read twice.

That is not a creative failure. It is what happens when a decision is left unmade upstream and then falls to somebody downstream who has a deadline and less information than the person who avoided it.

An occasion is wallpaper. Every competitor is hanging the same roll, and the customer spent a month standing in a room papered in it.

A brief that names the month has decided when the work runs. A brief that names one person has decided what the work is.