The hour before the cannon

The plan calls the Ramadan afternoon dead, and for attention it is right. Nobody is reading. Nobody wants to be sold anything at three in the afternoon on the tenth day. The graphs sag, everybody agrees, and the money goes to the night.

Every Ramadan afternoon looks the same, though, and the next one starts in about a week if the sighting holds. Stand in a bakery at half past four.

The queue is out of the door and moving quickly. Nobody is browsing. Bread, then the sweet thing the family expects, then out. Two doors down the juice shop has a row of cups already filled and lidded. The supermarket is full of people holding three items rather than thirty. The delivery bikes are parked outside the restaurant with the engines off, waiting for a run that will all leave inside twenty minutes. By the time the cannon goes and the city stops, the evening has been paid for.

That is the best purchasing hour of the Ramadan day and it has almost no advertising in it. Nobody in that queue has looked at a screen since noon, and nobody in it will remember a brand they met that afternoon.

So it is not an attention market. It is decided by presence: which shop is on the way home, whose sign is lit, what is still on the shelf at twenty to five, whose order was taken at three by a person who answered the phone.

A plan measures attention because attention is what a plan can count. The hour in which most of the month's money changes hands has nothing written against it, and it is won by whoever happened to be standing there.