The shortest copy of the year

The Eid greeting is the shortest piece of copy a brand writes all year, and the most read. One line, one morning, every brand in the region posting at once, and every customer scrolling past a hundred of them between the prayer and the first coffee.

It is the purest test of the borrowed minute I know. The reader gave a second, and the card had to give something back.

Most of them give back a logo on a crescent. The brand name, the greeting itself in a script font, a gold gradient, and the same phrase the agency used for the March Eid, which was fine in March.

The phrase is where it gets interesting, because the phrase tells you where the agency sits. Egypt has its own greeting for the day, warm and slightly domestic, the kind of thing said to family, to neighbours and to the doorman. The Gulf has a different one, more formal, closer to a wish that the person be among those who see the day come round again. Both mean happy Eid. Neither is the other. A Saudi reader handed the Egyptian line knows in half a second that the card was written in Cairo, and a Cairo reader handed the Gulf line knows it was written for somebody else.

The dialect answers the question of who the line is for before the reader has reached the logo. Most brands give that away without noticing.

The greetings I remember are almost never clever. They say one true thing in the reader's own words and nothing at all about the brand. The line the reader's grandmother would say, in the dialect she would say it in, with the logo small enough to miss.

The rest are a logo on a crescent. The reader gave a second and got a logo back.