The cheap month

Ramadan is expected to begin around the start of March, depending on the sighting. Three weeks, give or take, until every advertising budget in the region arrives in the same place on the same night.

They all want the same person. The delivery apps, the grocers, the telecoms, the banks, the chocolate, the furniture showroom with a payment plan, the hotel with a tent to fill. Same hours, same platforms, thirty nights.

An auction does not know any of that is happening. It counts how many advertisers want the same attention at the same second, and it prices accordingly. So the cost of reaching a customer in Ramadan describes the other brands in the room. It says almost nothing about the customer.

I have watched a great many small accounts at once, and the pattern is reliable. February looks healthy. March looks broken. The founder decides the creative stopped working, rebuilds it, and gets the same result at a worse price, because nothing stopped working. The room filled up.

Harder to see is what was available in February and was not taken.

The person who costs a fortune in March is here now, cheaper, and being spoken to by nobody, because nobody has anything to sell them yet. They will open a message. They will give an email address for something genuinely useful. They will try a first order at a sensible price and tell you what they thought of it. None of that is expensive this month, for the simple reason that no other brand is bidding for it.

The expensive month is paid for in the cheap one. Whatever you own in March, a list, a saved conversation, a customer who has already ordered once, was collected in February. Everything else is rented by the night, at a price your competitors set.