By Afrah Asmar
You can always tell when a campaign wasn’t made by someone who lives here.
It’s in the tone. The overpolished Arabic. The recycled Ramadan scripts. The women styled like a 2004 magazine shoot. Everything is technically correct yet completely off. The truth is, many brands are still talking about Arab audiences, not to them.
Especially in the Middle East, the disconnect is constant. Women, Gen Z, even everyday consumers – some of the most misrepresented groups in global marketing – aren’t misunderstood because they’re complex. They’re misunderstood because the process is broken.
Here’s how it usually goes: a global team writes the strategy. A regional team localizes it. Someone tweaks the script. Done.
What gets lost in that assembly line is nuance
You can’t fake tone. You can’t localize cultural intuition. If your Arabic reads like a direct translation, people will scroll. If your visual identity looks like a Western mood board with Arabic fonts pasted on, you’ve lost the plot.
And here’s the part most people miss: the Middle East isn’t one market.
The dialect in Beirut is worlds apart from Jeddah. A reference that lands in Amman might fall flat in Muscat. Humor, pace, even the emojis people use shift from one country to the next. Yet brands often treat the region like a single audience, recycling the same tropes and stock images that don’t reflect how people here actually look, dress, or live.
There’s no such thing as a “standard Arab audience.” Assuming there is? That’s the fastest way to get ignored.
I’ve seen campaigns fail not because the idea was bad, but because the understanding of the audience was wrong.
That’s why I’ve pushed back, questioning briefs, challenging assumptions, rebuilding content from the ground up. I’ve chosen creators who actually reflect the culture, not just a casting checklist. I’ve even pulled shoots mid production to rework the cast when the default options looked like a stock photo version of the region.
One of the most effective projects I led involved building an international brand’s digital presence in the Gulf from scratch. No paid media. No borrowed global assets. Just organic growth made for the audience, not adapted from somewhere else. It was a brand new page but traction came fast. The account grew from zero to more than 160,000 followers organically. People recognized themselves in the work and that recognition is what made it resonate.
Audiences today aren’t passive. They don’t just skip bad content, they call it out. If your campaign feels like a checkbox exercise, they’ll know. And they won’t be kind.
The bar is higher now
Good marketing here doesn’t start with translation. It starts with listening. With knowing when silence says more than copy. Which references need no explanation. And, most importantly, what not to say at all.
That kind of fluency doesn’t come from reading a deck. It comes from being in the room. From rewriting. Reframing. Relearning. From actually knowing who you’re talking to and how they talk back.
The brands that get it right don’t just localize. They speak audience.
About the Author
Afrah Asmar is a culturally fluent strategist and content manager who has led work for global brands including Nutella, Coca Cola, Unilever, and Kinder. Based in Dubai for much of her career, she has worked at top agencies across the region, helping brands communicate in a way that feels real, not rehearsed. She writes about the intersection of culture, behavior, and communication in the digital age.
