The radius did not travel

Open a small Cairo account in the third week of June and the map is still a circle over Cairo.

The centre sits where the kitchen is. The edge stops around the ring road, because that is as far as the drivers go. The audience was drawn by the delivery area, which was the correct answer in the spring and is the reason nothing works this week.

The customer that circle was built around is two hundred kilometres west. She is on the coast with her sister's family for six weeks, she has more free hours than she has had all year, her phone is in her hand at eleven at night, and she is being shown an offer for a suburb she will not see again until September.

Where she actually is, there is a road with restaurants on it, a supermarket, a courier who will find her, and a family group on her phone deciding tonight where everybody is ordering from.

Location is the setting nobody goes back to. It gets answered once, in the first ten minutes of building the account, by somebody solving a delivery problem rather than an audience problem. Budgets get looked at weekly. Creative gets refreshed monthly. The map gets opened after something has already broken.

So the month gets filed as a demand problem. Cost per order up, orders down, people are away, wait for September.

They are not away from their phones. They are on holiday with time and money, which is the best combination a small brand ever gets in front of, in a town that has a name and a pin of its own.

That circle is still right about the kitchen. It has been wrong about the customer since the coast opened.