The pickup queue

Half past one, outside a school in Dubai or Riyadh. A line of cars along the kerb, engines running for the air conditioning, and in almost every driver's seat a mother with a phone in her hand.

She is early because the gate is chaos at two and early is the only way to be gone by a quarter past. So she sits. Twenty minutes, forty on a bad day. Nobody is asking her for anything. The children are still inside, and the screen is the only thing in the car that wants her attention.

I would struggle to name a more attentive forty minutes anywhere in this region. She reads to the end. She saves things, and she forwards them, to a sister, to the family group, to the friend three cars ahead.

Now open the media plan written for her. Most of the weight sits in the evening, from eight, because that is when reach is cheapest and the household is assumed to be together and watching. The dayparts were inherited from television. Prime time, daytime, late. They describe when a screen in a living room is on, not when a person is free to look at one.

At eight she is not free. She is serving dinner, checking homework and negotiating a bedtime, and the phone is face down on the counter. The plan reaches her then at full price, in the one hour she cannot give it.

Around now, depending on the school, the UAE schools take their autumn break, and for a week the kerb outside the gate is empty. The daypart simply vanishes. Nothing on the plan moves, because nothing on the plan ever knew the queue was there.

Her attention has a timetable, and the school wrote it. The plan's dayparts belong to the television. Hers belong to the school gate, and only one of them is in the buy.