Written by whoever stayed

The autumn plan is about to be written, and it will be written by whoever did not go away.

Schools across the Gulf close around the end of this month, and from the first days of July the senior people leave in a slow wave that does not fully return until the second half of August. The work does not leave with them. The National Day creative, the fourth-quarter brief, the media plan for the busiest three months of the year: all of it has deadlines that fall inside the empty weeks, so all of it gets drafted inside the empty weeks.

Drafted by whom is the question nobody asks.

Usually by the people who could not go. The planner in her first year. The account manager who joined in March and has no leave yet. The agency team in a city that does not empty. Good people, mostly, doing their honest best with a brief that arrived as a paragraph in an email. They make a hundred small decisions in July because somebody has to, and every one of them is sensible on its own.

Then late August arrives. The senior people come back rested and behind, and they find a plan that is already presented and already costed. Changing it now means unpicking eight weeks of work by people who were there when nobody else was. So it gets a few notes and a signature, and by October it is being executed with all the authority of a decision nobody actually took.

It reads like consensus. It is momentum.

Every autumn I watch teams explain a soft October with the market, the platforms, the creative. Almost never with the calendar. If I could add one column to any post-mortem it would be this: who was in the room when this was written, and who was on a beach.

Nobody measures who wrote the plan. It is the one variable that explains most of what happens in October.