Campaign Middle East features a monthly Private View section with a range of insights and viewpoints from industry experts, revealing the intricate world of marketing and advertising campaigns.
This month’s review is by Najib Sabbagh, CEO, SSUP World.
PepsiCo: Pepsi Football Nation
The campaign is a masterclass in how global brands accidentally sterilize the thing they are trying to celebrate. The idea is excellent. Fans write the rules. The execution betrays it. What I see on screen is a polished, premium, perfectly lit version of fandom, scrubbed of everything that makes fandom actually feel like fandom. No sweat, no chants you cannot understand, no arguments that ruin dinner. Just beautiful people in beautiful kits saying beautifully on-brand things. I would have done the opposite.
I would have made the ugliest, loudest, most uncomfortable football film of the year. Give me one real fan in Cairo refusing to wash his jersey, one uncle in Riyadh who has not spoken to his cousin since the last Hilal-Nassr derby, one teenager in São Paulo whose superstition cost his team the game. Because the brand that wins the next World Cup will not be the one with the cleanest film. It will be the one brave enough to look like the game actually looks at 2am in a living room when your team has just lost on penalties.
Dubai Police and RTA: Drive Like Your Mother’s Watching
This is what good government work looks like, and most government work in our region still does not look like this. No fear, no blood, no lecture. Just a mother’s voice and a knowing smile. The craft is calm, the casting is right, the Arabic-first decision is brave.
My only worry is the usual one. Smart government campaigns in this region tend to win awards, get applauded internally, and then quietly get replaced. RTA should protect this one. Build a platform around Khaseibah, not a campaign.
The most interesting thing about this campaign is what is missing from it. No celebrity ambassador, no influencer convoy, no aspirational sunset couple. Just a real family, a real mess, and a destination positioning itself as the practical answer to a problem every UAE parent has lived.
That is harder to brief and harder to defend in a boardroom than a celebrity spot, and Yas Island deserves credit for backing the harder choice. The ‘effortless family holiday’ space is one of the most defensible territories in regional tourism right now, and ‘The Answer is Yas’ plants a clear flag in it. My only push: own the platform. Smart, family-honest campaigns in this region tend to get launched, applauded, and then replaced by a louder international push within the year.
Seagulls Media’s BeatFM: Side Effects
Beautifully crafted, and I want to love it more than I do. The pharma packaging code is sharp, the typography is disciplined, the print frames are scroll-stoppers. But pharma-as-design-language has been one of the most over-used borrowed equities in advertising over the last five years, from skincare to snack brands to mental health apps. The idea deserves a visual world that is not already familiar. For a station betting on Gen Z’s emotional reality, the assets feel a generation older than the audience. The strategy is right. The execution is one creative leap short.
Big4Travel: There Is A Way Out
Nearly half the world is not interested in football. That is not my opinion, that is FIFA’s own data. Big4Travel built an entire campaign around that single number, while most of the global brands in this review spent eight figures pretending the other half is everyone. That is the lesson worth taking away from this private view. The best work this month did not come from the biggest budget or the biggest names.
It came from a Bangkok travel agency willing to read a room nobody else was looking at. Horizon FCB Dubai turned a contrarian insight into a working mechanic, FIFA rankings as travel discounts, and that is the part most agencies miss. A clever line is not a campaign. A clever line attached to a structure that can run all summer is. My closing thought, addressed to every CMO reading this: the audience you are not talking to is usually bigger than the audience you are.
By Najib Sabbagh, CEO, SSUP World.
