Creative Direction
The Gulf

Four years later I am still here, and it is now the market I know best.

Kuwait first. Head of the creative department at Horizon FCB, a nineteen-person team across copy, art and design. In one year we secured three major businesses: Burgan Bank, Nissan and Hardee's. The Nissan work earned an Effie shortlist for Best Use of AI — my first award of the new chapter, in the discipline that would come to define it.

Then Riyadh. Associate Creative Director at VML on the machinery of Saudi's biggest brands: STC, Almarai, Flynas, Monsha'at. A year inside the market that everything in the region now revolves around. Learning its codes, its pace, its people.

Then Creative Director at Bold Creatives, running a twenty-five-person department across sport and government: the Esports World Cup, the Ministry of Sport, Sports Boulevard, Danone's YoPro launch. MENA Effie Bronze for Deemah Chips.

Then Footballco. Regional Creative Director at the world's largest football media company, building season-long branded content platforms for the biggest sponsors in Saudi football, and writing and directing for Nescafé and SAVVY Games. It is the chapter where the market knowledge, the department experience and the fan instinct finally ran through the same piece of work.

Four markets in four years sounds like movement. It was actually construction. Each stop added a floor. Kuwait taught me to lead departments, VML taught me the Saudi machine from inside a global network, Bold taught me to run sport and government work at scale, Footballco taught me what to do once you have the audience's attention all season instead of for thirty seconds.

I do not visit this market. I live in it, and have for four years.