The dip everyone agrees on

For two years I drew the summer dip into every media plan I built.

The chart made it easy. Pull last year's spend by month and there it was: a trough across July and August, deep in the Gulf, shallower in Egypt. The categories were seasonal, the sales curves dipped, the region emptied. I phased the money around the hole like everyone else and moved on to the months that mattered.

What I did not ask was where the chart came from.

It came from us. Last year's spend was low in July because last year's planner cut July, working from the year before, when the planner before them had done the same. Every agency in the region was reading the same curve and drawing the same line. The chart was a record of our own decisions, redrawn annually with great confidence, and I read it as a measurement.

The people, meanwhile, had not gone the way the chart implied. The city was quieter, but the ones still in it were indoors, in air conditioning, with more time on their phones than in any other month, and with fewer advertisers competing for them. Every auction I have watched since, from the platform side, says the same thing: in July the scarce thing is buyers, and attention goes cheap. It shows up as the lowest cost of reach in the year, in the month the plans had written off.

I had it wrong. I treated a trough we had dug ourselves as weather, and I had a chart to prove it.

The dip was not the market. It was us, and the cheapest attention of the year sat in the month we had all agreed to leave.