Campaign’s Creative Faces to Watch 2023 – Rama Ghanem, Copywriter, AKQA Dubai
Age: 24
Nominated by Samar Sidani, Associate Creative Director, AKQA Dubai:
As the advertising industry bleeds into other fields like entertainment, film, arts and culture, Rama’s experience as a hybrid in those areas proves not only valuable, but necessary to set the course for the development of our work as an agency. With her deep contemporary art and film background, she brings with her an all-rounder’s perspective and fresh references from outside our industry, weaving together ideas that have become essential to our projects and collaborations. As the gulf and EMEA begin to invest in art and culture, and as brands continue to search for globalized points of view, her bilingual background has allowed her to marry an international outlook to local briefs while being adept at using her cultural sensibilities to the advantage and impact of our work. Her wider team reports that she has opened up new avenues of thought around linguistics and the creative potential of the English language and its possible applications across their work in experience design and strategy departments too. She’s the kind of person who challenges convention and crafts copy that breaks through and connects with dexterity, wit and humor. As such, she is constantly pushing communications into unexpected territories, with emphasis on originality and exceptional quality. Rama’s ambition to grow within and beyond our industry with her finger in many pies will reap fantastic work that reaches beyond the brief.
Career highlights
Rama does many things. A writer, curator, artist, and filmmaker—in short, a culture-maker— it’s hard to pin her to a single niche. She thinks up ideas for brands that want audacious, tuned-in communications. She has curated several exhibitions and has earned several nods from critics at Vogue, Architectural Digest, and Artforum (Editor’s Pick). She is a practicing conceptual artist and filmmaker, and holds a BFA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London. She is a scholar and fellow with the prestigious Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship, a program run by the Rhode Island School of Design.
She has a hankering for copywriting and is, controversially, a fan of the Oxford comma. She works agency-side as a wordsmith at AKQA, where her roster of clients include Hyundai, Toyota, Dyson, Crate & Barrel, Krispy Kreme, and Baskin Robbins.
Guiding principles
– Quality comes first. Always.
– Challenge the status quo and leave your assumptions at the door.
– Be true to your creative convictions and personal values.
– Kill your darlings.
Side hustle
Rama edits art publications for local institutions, writing both short-form and long-form pieces that span urgent areas of discourse like gender and women’s rights, body politics, and environmental justice.
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