The greeting nobody reads

There is one sentence every brand in the Kingdom will publish tomorrow, and it could be written for all of them today.

Happy National Day. A flag, the logo turned green, a line of Arabic underneath. By noon the feed is a wall of them, the same every year, and the eye stops reading somewhere around the fourth.

I find the greeting more revealing than the ad, because the greeting has nothing to hide behind. An ad has an offer. If the copy is stiff, the price does the talking. A greeting has no price. It is a brand walking up to a household on its day and saying something, and the only thing on show is whether it knows how to speak.

Most do not. The line arrives in the register of the news bulletin, formal enough that nobody has ever said it across a table. Or it arrives translated, an English sentence in Arabic letters, wishing you a joyful celebration, which no aunt in Jeddah has ever wished anyone. Or it is the same line the bank used, and the telecom, and the airline, because there is a safe version and everyone reached for it.

The customer gave that line half a second. What they got back was a logo.

The greetings that get read sound like a neighbour. Short. Said the way a family says it to itself on the day, in the Arabic of the house. They give something small: a memory, a dish, a photograph of the street rather than the skyline. They do not mention the product at all, and they are the only post that day the customer might forward to the family group.

Which is the test. A brand that cannot write the greeting cannot write the ad either. It has only been hiding behind the price.