Campaign’s Creative Faces to Watch 2021 – Salma Shahin, Senior Account Manager, IMPACT BBDO
Age: 29
Nominated by Paul Shearer, Chief Creative Officer, IMPACT BBDO
Within advertising, it’s hard to find talent that plays a generalist role, and knows a bit of everything – Salma has defiance to defend creative work with clients, get them on our team, bring work to life and project management to the tee. She’s our go-to account lead on award-winning creative work and has the spirit to excite everyone on the team about the work.
Bio
Salma is a Senior Account Manager at IMPACT BBDO Dubai. Prior to advertising, she worked in PR at FleishmanHillard in Washington, DC specializing in crisis communications. She’s an Egyptian-American, and a third-culture kid. She graduated from the University of Maryland with a bachelor’s in communications in 2013.
Professional Achievements:
Most recently, Salma led on the launch of TENA in the Middle East through a purposeful campaign calling for the change of the term ‘menopause’ in Arabic – the word is now officially changed in the Arab region’s largest online dictionary.
Salma led one of the most innovative Ramadan campaigns in the region, in 2016. The Pepsi Ramadan campaign, championing togetherness with an ad you literally cannot watch alone. Google it!
She has also been part of numerous campaigns that have banked in international creative awards shows – most significantly the Zero Tolerance Ribbon campaign winner at Cannes Lion in 2018.
Guiding principles
Invest energy only in the things that give you energy back.
How has Covid changed your job?
For the past couple of years, there’s been propaganda around agile marketing, but it’s only when COVID hit that we were faced with the reality of agile collaboration. Brainstorming, discussing, debating & creating behind a screen is not the easiest road to manoeuvre, but with COVID we’ve learned to adopt new ways of working as a team, and in turn, found ways to be more efficient with our time. Some might disagree, but WFH during COVID has definitely proven to be fertile ground for the multi-taskers of this industry.
Side hustle
My biggest flex is co-founding Egypt’s largest running group and marathon Organization, @CairoRunners – Ironically, that’s where my passion for communications started, as I started off by building the brand around it and heading all social media & PR activities for it. Check out @CairoRunners on Instagram.
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