Ramadan begins in the middle of April this year. Any brand without a Ramadan marketing calendar in production is already late. Egyptian consumer spending concentrates into this month more heavily than in any other market we work in, and so does everybody else’s advertising. The result is a four week window where attention is at its annual peak and inventory is at its most expensive, and where the difference between a strong month and a wasted one is decided in Shaaban rather than in Ramadan.
Four phases of the Ramadan marketing calendar, four different jobs
The month is not one audience moment. It is four, and they want different things.
The run up, roughly the three weeks before, is when households stock the kitchen, buy the fanous and the decorations, and book whatever needs booking. Media is still cheap and intent is already high. This is the best value converting window of the entire season and most brands sleep straight through it.
The first ten days carry the highest attention and the highest prices. Launch the hero creative here if you have one, but understand you are paying a premium for a crowded feed. The middle stretch is where fatigue sets in, audiences turn selective and utility beats emotion: recipes, delivery cut off times, opening hours, anything that solves a problem somebody has at six in the evening.
The last ten nights and the week into Eid belong to gifting. Fashion, electronics, jewelry, toys and anything giftable do a disproportionate share of annual revenue in that stretch. Budget for it as a separate campaign, because the buyer, the message and the urgency are all different from the first three weeks.
The clock inside the day matters more than the date
Ramadan does not only change what people buy, it changes when they can be reached. Afternoons go quiet and stay quiet, and the two hours before iftar are close to dead for anything that is not food delivery. From roughly an hour after iftar until well past midnight, usage climbs to the highest levels of the year, and there is a second smaller peak around suhoor.
Running a flat twenty four hour schedule through all of that is a straightforward way to donate money to the auction. Daypart it. Push weight into the evening block, cut the afternoon back hard, and test the small hours, which are usually the cheapest quality attention available anywhere in the calendar.
Where the budget should actually sit
Cost per thousand impressions in Egypt typically climbs by something between a third and two thirds during Ramadan, depending on the category. Spreading the same daily budget evenly across the month therefore means paying peak prices for the mid month lull. We front load the weeks before the month starts, hold a reserve for the last ten nights, and keep the middle deliberately lean.
Then there is the creative trap. Almost every brand in the country makes the same warm film about a family, a lantern and a table, and by the second week nobody can tell one from another. The work that gets remembered is either genuinely useful or unmistakably specific to the brand. If your Ramadan asset would still make sense with a competitor logo at the end of it, it is not an asset, it is a tax.
Getting this right is a media buying exercise as much as a creative one, and the plan has to be finished before the month begins rather than argued about during it. That sequencing is exactly what our paid media advertising and planning team builds in the weeks before the season opens.
