Who is actually shut

From about today, in a great many status emails, the region is described as shut.

Walk around and check. Riyadh is in the middle of its season, the one that runs from autumn to spring and fills the city's evenings with people who came to spend. Jeddah's restaurants are full from Thursday night, because that is when the weekend starts. Bahrain has just had its national day and Qatar has its own tomorrow. Cairo works through to January, because the holiday Cairo keeps is in January. The weather is the best it will be all year, and the malls know it.

What is actually closing is a head office abroad and one layer of Dubai: the layer that reports to that office, writes the status email, and books its flights for the same fortnight the office does.

That would not matter, except that the layer holds the media budget.

So the same pause happens every year. Campaigns are set to a cautious budget on about the seventeenth, creative is frozen, the agency is told nothing new until January, and the regional account runs on autopilot through some of the busiest weeks of the Saudi year. Every plan carries a line for Ramadan. None of them carries a line for the fortnight the plan's own authors are away.

Nobody measures what the pause costs, and I think I know why. The cost is invisible to the people who decided it, because in the city where they decided it, the market was closed too. From there the pause looks free.

From Riyadh it looks like a competitor who went quiet in the middle of the season.

The shutdown exists in the org chart. It does not exist in the market, and the market does not wait for the org chart to come back.