The customer is on the road

Eid al-Adha is expected around now, depending on the sighting, and the region spends the first days of it in a car.

Riyadh up to Taif, or down to the coast. Cairo out to the village, or north to the sea. Five or six hours with three children, a cool box on the back seat, and a driver who left before dawn to get the road while it is still cool.

Most of the Eid advertising I see is written for a living room. A long table, a greeting, the family arriving at the door, the product somewhere near the sofa. It is a lovely picture of a house the customer is not in.

Name the person actually buying something that day. He is four hours into a drive. He has stopped because the tank is at a quarter and the children need to get out of the car. He has eleven minutes and one bar of signal. He walks into a forecourt shop, buys water, crisps and a bag of something to keep the back seat quiet, and pays cash because the card machine is asking him to wait.

Every one of those decisions comes off that shelf. Not off a screen he looked at last week, and not out of an app that will not load a menu on one bar.

So the brands that exist on the first day of Eid are the ones at the petrol station, at the rest stop, at the roadside kitchen with the generator running, and at the shop by the exit that stayed open.

The highway is the largest room in the region that week and there is no media plan in it. There is a shelf, a fridge, a queue, and whoever thought about being there back in April.