The ‘thought leadership’ pieces are everywhere.
“Saudi needs a new playbook.”
“Creativity is the next frontier.”
“Storytelling must evolve.”
But peel back the headlines and what you often find is the same recycled thought wrapped in mediocrity: bland ideas disguised as insight or vague strategies packaged as vision. For a region that’s rewriting its future with staggering speed, the conversation about creativity has stalled.
Here’s what you won’t often hear:
Saudi doesn’t need a new playbook. It needs to throw out the genre entirely.
Saudi is buzzing. The skylines rise like a promise. In just a few years, the Kingdom has morphed from a quiet country into the world’s most ambitious project. Giga-projects pierce the horizon. Digital billboards flicker with technicolour dreams. New logos, new brands and new ambitions – everywhere.
But beneath the gleam of transformation lies a growing challenge for marketers and brand builders across the Kingdom: a white noise problem.
Since 2016, when Vision 2030 opened the door to a new social and economic era, Saudi Arabia has been reborn as a nation in motion. Tourism, fintech, gaming, entertainment, and artificial intelligence (AI) – the velocity of change is staggering. It’s what drew me to the region. But for all the investment, innovation and imported expertise, something critical is missing: distinctiveness.
Every week, new brands are unveiled with breathless urgency. But too many sound and look the same. Naming conventions repeat. Visual identities blur together.
Messaging often reads like a mood board: “The future is here.” “Empowering tomorrow.” “Redefining excellence.” The language of transformation has become so familiar that it’s lost its edge.
Of course, some of this is inevitable. Saudi Arabia, in its current form, is still young. Just eight years into an unprecedented transformation. When you compare it to South Korea post-’88 Olympics, Dubai in the 2000s or China during the 2010s tech boom, the parallels are clear. Rapid growth often breeds aesthetic convergence. When everyone’s racing to launch, the default is to imitate what looks successful.
But that instinct is exactly what Saudi must resist. The white noise isn’t a product of inexperience. It’s a symptom of creative timidity.
Here’s the truth: Saudi Arabia is not the cultural outlier many outsiders think it is. That framing is outdated. Young Saudis are hyper-connected, multilingual and global in taste, but local in identity. They scroll TikTok, binge Netflix, follow global creators and homegrown ones alike. They crave humour, progression and authenticity just like their peers everywhere else.
And yet, what they’re served too often is gloss without guts. This isn’t a question of talent. It’s one of creative courage.
At a structural level, Saudi is still building its creative class. While media budgets are ballooning – digital ad spend in Saudi alone hit $1.3bn in 2024, up from just $780m in 2020 – the creative infrastructure is still catching up. Many of the most celebrated campaigns are led from outside the Kingdom. Local nuance gets lost. Meanwhile, local creatives often operate without the mentorship, exposure, or platform needed to break the mould. The result? Work that feels neither fully Saudi nor fully global. Just … safe.
And safe doesn’t scale. In a market saturated with newness, “pleasant” isn’t a brand position, it’s a liability.
With hundreds of new companies entering the fray across sectors such as tourism, fintech, real estate and clean tech, attention is the scarcest commodity. Launching quickly matters. But launching memorably is survival.
The brands that will thrive in the next five years won’t be the ones with the deepest pockets; they’ll be the ones with the sharpest point of view – the ones brave enough to be different, not for the sake of it, but because the truth of Saudi today demands it.
This country is full of contrasts: old and new, tradition and ambition, heritage and hyper-modernity. That’s not a liability. That’s a creative goldmine. The best work in the world, from Nike in the ’90s to the rise of Japanese streetwear brands today, has always come from embracing complexity, not sanding it down.
Saudi doesn’t need to “catch up” to the West. It has the chance to leapfrog it creatively, by skipping the templated global branding phase and going straight into something bold, contemporary and unmistakably local.
Not nostalgic. Not imitative. Not beige.
Original. Truthful. Alive.
This is the opportunity in front of every marketer, creative director, and business leader in the Kingdom. Not to ask, “Is it polished?” but “Will anyone remember this tomorrow?”
Because, make no mistake: the world is watching. The ambition is real. The investment is historic.
But if every voice sounds the same, every billboard blurs together, and every brand hides behind safe slogans, then the noise will drown out the message.
By Jon Holloway, Managing Director, AKQA MENA
