There is a particular kind of athlete the world tends to overlook. Not because they lack discipline, dedication or the drive that defines competitive sport. They are overlooked because of a number. Their age. Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026 was the first global iteration of a games designed to shatter conventional thinking that ties age and gender with capability, and Quill Communications partnered with the Games to do exactly that.
With more than 40,000 athletes competing across 38 sports from more than 150 countries, the event carried a mandate far larger than medals and records; it was a cultural statement backed by the Presidential Court’s commitment to active aging and intergenerational health.
When Quill, one of the GCC’s leading fully integrated marketing and communications agencies, came on board three months before launch, the brief they were handed carried that mandate in full.
The task was not to fill a stadium or drive registrations, though both needed to happen. The task was to shift how Abu Dhabi, and the nation, understood what it meant to age actively. This required moving beyond event marketing into cultural narrative building.
The Quill strategy that held it together
The strategy centred on “United by sport, active for life” became the functional promise. “Masters are built, not born” became the emotional truth.
Together, they gave the campaign a conviction that transcended the ten days of competition to a life time point of view.
“When we came on board, we knew fairly quickly that this could not be treated as a conventional event campaign,” said Maan Bou Dargham, CEO, Quill. “The Games carried a cultural brief. It was asking people to rethink what ageing looks like, what capability looks like, and what sport means across a lifetime. Our job was to give that belief a voice loud enough and consistent enough to actually move something in people. That is a different kind of responsibility than filling a registration funnel.”
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From the groundswell to the first whistle
Translating that conviction into a live, city-wide, ten-day operation across Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and Al Dhafra was where the complexity began.
Quill ran the full campaign spanning strategy, creative, social media, digital, PR and production, with more than 1,000 content pieces produced entirely in-house.
Quill’s social and digital teams drove a focused registration campaign through engaging content, programmatic marketing and a full-funnel digital approach that worked in concert with the Games’ own out-of-home activity.
More than 20,000 athlete registrations were secured within a month. A dedicated ticket sales campaign brought 25,000 people to the welcome ceremony at Zayed Sports City Stadium in under three days.
Keeping pace with the Games
Once competition began, the operation shifted into something that resembled a newsroom as much as a marketing team.
The social output across the ten days reached 400-plus posts, 180-plus reels, and 200-plus statics. The overall results across the three months reflected that responsiveness: more than 212 million impressions, 65 million in organic reach, 500,000-plus engagements, and 30,000-plus new followers across the Games’ platforms.
The PR campaign too carried both the scale and the soul of the Games beyond the UAE. More than 3,000 unique media stories were generated over three months, with coverage spanning 400-plus local and international outlets and supported by 100-plus influencer activations.
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What shifted: Quill gives voice to an idea
For Quill, the Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026 was proof of what an embedded, full-service agency partner can deliver as a single integrated engine rather than a collection of separate workstreams.
But the more meaningful measure was whether Abu Dhabi’s conversation around active aging actually moved. Whether the idea that a 60-year-old swimmer, a 92-year-old sprinter, or a 70-year-old judoka could be a source of cultural pride and not curiosity, landed with the weight it deserved.
Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026 gave that idea a stage. Quill gave it a voice. And for the athletes who competed, many of whom had spent years being told their time had passed, it gave them something rarer still: proof that it had not.
CREDITS:
Client: Open Masters Games Abu Dhabi 2026
Creative agency: Quill Communications
Creative
- Hadi Ghoussainy– Associate Creative Director
- Farah Beaini – Senior Art Director
- Martin Iskander – Art Director
- Ava Paclibar – Art Director
- Mohamad Aniss Al Bitar – Art Director
- Tammam Shayya – Senior Multimedia Designer
Editorial
- Raef Al Attar – Creative Copy Director
- Nishath Nizar – Senior Editorial Director
Client Servicing
- Joy Choucair – Associate Account Director
- Ahmed Abdelbaset – Account Manager
- Kamar Jaber – Senior Account Executive
- Lana Sleiman – Account Director
Public Relations & Media
- Anas Khaleliyah – Account Director
- Badoui Kheir – Senior Media Monitoring Coordinator
Production
- Jimmy Moussa – Production Manager
- Mohammed Kilani – Production Manager
- Ibrahim Soliman – Senior Content Producer
- Mohammed Shafeeq – Senior Content Producer
- Aya Kanaan – Content Producer
- Mohammed Nabil – Senior Content Producer
- Samer Abdallah – Content Producer
- Ahmed Eses Sayed – Content Producer
- Abduallah Mohammedtoum – Senior Video Editor
- Sharaf Kilo – Senior Video Editor
Digital Performance
- Bharat Hotwani – Associate Account Director
- Amine Smain – Performance Marketing Specialist
