The dashboard on Eid morning

Today is Eid al-Adha in Saudi Arabia, and within a day of it everywhere else I work. Every Eid morning on an advertising account has the same notes.

The account is flat until the prayer is over. Nothing worth reading before mid-morning, then a small lift, which is mostly people looking at their phones in the back of a car on the way to somebody's mother's house.

The delivery apps wake before the shops do. The first orders of the day are breakfast for a house with twenty people in it, placed by whoever got up first, and they land two hours before anyone has lifted a shutter.

The creative somebody forgot to swap is still running. It was built for the March Eid. It congratulates the customer on a month of fasting that ended in March, and it mentions new clothes, on the morning of the Eid that is about the sacrifice and the road to the family. Nobody noticed, because the person who would notice is at their mother's house, which is where the customer is too.

The only messages that arrive are customers asking where the order is. Not replies to the greeting, not the campaign. Where is my order, sent at eleven from a full house to a brand whose office is dark.

Nothing on the dashboard means anything today. The budget is going out, the click price is strange, and conversions are whatever the delivery apps say they are. The numbers are on holiday too.

No lesson today. One useful act, and then the phone goes back in the pocket: the ad with the wrong Eid on it gets switched off.