When two calendars collide

Two briefs are being written this month for the same fortnight in February, and I do not think anyone has put them on the same wall.

The first is Founding Day. Saudi Arabia, 22 February, a fixed date. It has become a retail moment: licensed promotions, the green, the traditional dress, a daytime crowd in the malls, a week of offers built around a morning of pride.

The second is Ramadan. If the sighting lands where it is expected, the month begins around 18 February, which puts the twenty-second inside it. If it does, it will be the first time since the day was instituted that the two have met. Ramadan moves about eleven days earlier each year, and this is the year it arrives.

The two were written for different moods. Founding Day is a daytime event, and in Ramadan the daytime is dead. The month is an evening market, and the evening belongs to the table, the family, the slow hour after iftar when the phone comes out. A promotion built for a crowd at eleven in the morning is going out into a country that is fasting until sunset.

The default, if nobody decides, is that both run. Two teams, sometimes two agencies, two content calendars, each approved on its own. On the day the feed carries a flag over an iftar, and the customer, who lives in one calendar and not two, notices that the brand does not.

This is a tone decision, and it cannot be made in February. Which calendar leads. Whether Founding Day in February is a nod at the top of an iftar post or a promotion moved to the evening. Whether the licence is used at all. It is not a hard decision. It is a December one, because by January the creative is in production and the answer has been given by whoever moved first.

Two calendars share the same fortnight. Somebody has to say which one the brand lives in.