The year starts in April

By the first week of April a great many marketing plans in this region have spent a quarter of the year and delivered one month of it.

Nobody made a mistake. The annual budget was set in twelfths, because that is how the finance calendar counts, and then the first quarter went where the work was: production in January, the buy in February, the month itself in March. January and February produced almost nothing on their own. They were rent on the peak.

So April opens with a tired team, a good deal less money than the calendar says should be left, and a full-year target that has not moved by a single riyal.

The instinct is to spread the remainder evenly and carry on. That is the instinct to protect the plan, and the plan has already gone. The first quarter is spent. It bought whatever it bought, and no amount of careful phasing turns it back into a quarter that is still available.

What works is to treat this week as the start of a shorter year. Nine months on the calendar, eight of them still open to a decision, a known amount of money, and a target that is now arithmetic rather than ambition. What is left only stretches to the target if the quiet months are as productive as the peak, and they will not be, so either the target moves or the spend does. April is the last month in which saying that out loud counts as planning rather than an excuse.

The second budget of the year is the real one. It gets written now, by whoever is still standing after Eid, and it is almost never the document with the cover page on it.