Whose table the ad is for

The first working Monday of Ramadan, the meeting is about the competitor's film. Every year, in every seat I have sat in.

Nobody put it on the agenda. It is there because the people who approve the plan watched that film at their own table over the weekend, sitting with their parents, their children and a cousin who does something else entirely, and one of them turned and asked what they thought of it. Then asked why theirs was not like that.

That question does not arrive through a tracker or a review. It arrives at the table, from family, in front of everybody. Eleven months of the year the people signing off the work are marketers who happen to watch television. For thirty nights they are in the audience, with everyone they are related to.

So the work carries a question the brief never mentions: whether it made a household pleased to be connected to it.

I used to treat that as a distortion, the sort of thing better reporting would settle. Then I watched enough of these months to notice it is the most honest audience test the work gets all year.

The Ramadan film is the one piece of work in the calendar whose real audience includes the household of the people approving it, and status here runs towards the family, not the peer group. A director who wants the work to be good on that table is not being vain. They are the only person in the building who will be asked about it by somebody who loves them.

So a plan is not defended through this month with incremental reach. It is defended by giving the approver something to say at eleven at night to a relative who has never seen a media plan.