Philip Smith, Media Solutions Director, The Vantage.Since the escalation of the Iran conflict, conversations with brands and advertisers across the Gulf changed almost overnight.
“We’re pausing everything until this settles down.”
“Maybe after the regional situation improves.”
“I think we revisit this when there’s a more positive news environment.”
“Why push my brand out there into a sea of negativity? Won’t readers simply associate my brand with military conflict, suffering and uncertainty?”
Such hesitation is understandable. The conflict has unsettled markets and dominated headlines for months. For many brands, the default strategy has been to wait it out.
Working with international media brands including The Economist, POLITICO, and Newsweek, I have heard the same question repeatedly over recent months: is this really the right moment to advertise?
It is a fair question. But I think brands consistently underestimate how influence actually works during volatile periods.
I was recently reading a piece about payment pressures facing major management consulting firms involved in government projects in Saudi Arabia. Halfway through, an advertisement from one of the Big Four appeared on the page.
My first reaction was that it felt slightly awkward (and somewhere, presumably, an agency account manager was bracing for a difficult client call). But the advertisement stayed with me longer than it probably should have. The awkwardness was part of why it stuck.
I found myself wondering whether they were among the firms being written about. I still don’t know. But that uncertainty was part of what made the advertisement impossible to ignore. I found myself thinking about consultancy scrutiny and consultancy relevance at the same time. Maybe that tension is a form of cognitive friction.
I am not saying difficult news environments automatically benefit advertisers. There are moments where adjacency can be problematic. Placing a luxury car ad next to a story about civilian casualties is not cognitive friction. It is just poor judgment.
A toothpaste brand advertising moments after Jake Paul loses a tooth in a fight against Anthony Joshua might be memorable, but probably for the wrong reasons.
Serious journalism was never designed to give brands a perfectly sanitised backdrop.
I have seen campaigns paused because the headlines felt uncomfortable, only for those brands to return months later when the atmosphere felt safer. By then, the conversation had moved on without them. The people they most needed to reach: investors, policymakers, HNWIs and senior executives, had all been reading carefully throughout the crisis.
Just not their ads.
Regional transformation agendas like Saudi Vision 2030, UAE Vision 2040 and Qatar National Vision 2030 are all pushing ahead while geopolitical tensions and economic uncertainty continue in the background. Transformation implies flux, bumpiness, and friction.
Brands still need visibility during periods of ‘bumpiness’, not just during moments of optimism. There is no frictionless version of the world waiting just around the corner.
In recent months, the media industry seems to have become so focused on eliminating friction that it has forgotten friction is sometimes the point.
Context still matters and so does tone, however sometimes an uncomfortable adjacency, handled well, is more memorable than a perfectly safe one. Sometimes a little discomfort is exactly what stops people scrolling past.
By Phil Smith, Media Solutions Director, The Vantage
