Turning the day back round

Eid began yesterday in Saudi Arabia, a day later in some places depending on the sighting. A great many advertising accounts in this region are still set for a month that has ended.

The schedule is weighted to eleven at night. The bids spent thirty days learning an inverted day, and they learned it properly, which is the problem. The copy still points at a table nobody is sitting at tonight. Somewhere a landing page is offering a set menu for a fast that has finished.

None of this is a mistake anybody made. It is what happens when nobody decides.

Every Ramadan plan I have seen has a start date. Very few have an end date. There is a briefing, an approval chain, a go-live, and then a wrap report some weeks later. The reversal sits in the gap between those two, owned by nobody, so it falls to whoever notices first. Nobody notices this week. The team is with their families, and the account is running itself on a set of decisions taken in February about March.

The bill for that arrives a fortnight later, in a cost report that shows an account still paying a night-time price for an hour that no longer has a crowd in it. Every year somebody asks why the weeks after Eid look weak, and part of the answer is that the month never stopped.

The accounts that come out of this cleanly did not move faster this morning. They wrote the way back out in February, on the same document as the switch-on, with dates and a person's name against every line that had to be undone.

A seasonal plan is not a launch. It is a lease, and the hand-back is part of the terms.