Who stays behind

The summer exodus from the Gulf begins with this Eid. The families with money and time leave with the holiday and come back with the schools, and they are the customer most plans in this region were written for.

The person on almost every Gulf brief is the same person: a household, a car, two or three children, a Friday routine, a budget for the weekend. From now until the end of the summer that person is abroad, or in a cooler city, or on a coast, and the brief is still running in Riyadh, talking to an empty house.

Look at who is actually here. The single expat in a shared flat who cannot afford to leave and would not know where to go. The shift worker at the hospital and the airport, whose summer is a rota. The family whose paperwork does not allow a holiday this year. The man whose wife and children flew ahead to the family home, now eating alone for six weeks and telling nobody. The people who keep the malls cold.

They live after dark. They order in. They do not have a Friday routine, because Friday is the day the city reminds them who is away. They have money, less of it, and they spend it differently: on themselves, in small amounts, late, from a phone.

Nobody writes a brief for this person. The summer plan is the January plan with a smaller number on it, so the brand spends less saying the same thing to a customer who has left, and reads the result as proof that summer is dead.

It is a smaller audience. It is also a specific one, which is the only kind a brand can actually be for.

Summer is not a smaller version of the same market. It is a different person in the same postcode. The brands I have watched do well in July kept the budget and changed the person on the brief.