Marketing & Advertising

The Room Before the Building

Arab marketing and creative communities have repeatedly formed in places where no institution was waiting for them. Riyadh is now building institutions first. The question is what grows inside them.

Ameer Albahouth

16 Sep 2026 • 9 min read

In 2013, Saudi Arabia had no cinemas. It also had, by several published counts, the highest per-capita YouTube use in the world. Around 28 million people were generating roughly 90 million video views a day, about three per person.

One of the most watched dramas of that period was Takki, a web series produced by the Jeddah network UTURN. It followed a young man who wanted to become a filmmaker in a country without a single public screen. The premise was not satire. It was a description of the people making it.

That detail is a useful place to begin, because it reverses the usual story about creative industries. The usual story runs from institutions to talent: a government funds a sector, a festival is launched, agencies open offices, and a community forms around them. The Arab world's creative history has more often run the other way. The community appeared first, in whatever space was available, and the institutions arrived later, sometimes years later, sometimes in another country.

Today the arrows are pointing in the opposite direction. Riyadh is building the institutions of a creative marketing industry at speed: regional headquarters, a home festival, licensing regimes, an arts university. This raises a question worth investigating. If Arab creative communities have historically formed in the gaps, what happens to them when the gaps are deliberately filled?

A community that kept moving

The region's modern advertising industry did not begin in the Gulf. It began in Beirut, where agencies started to flourish in the mid-1960s and Lebanese firms came to control much of the region's advertising budgets.

The 1975 civil war broke that arrangement apart. Executives and their clients relocated, many first to Cyprus, from where they serviced the Middle East offshore. The founder of the agency Impact, Alain Khouri, was among those who left for the island. Dani Richa, who later ran Impact BBDO, has described that period as the trigger for Lebanese dominance of regional advertising, rather than its interruption.

The next move came in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Dubai emerged as a commercial base and agencies shifted their head offices there. They brought their networks with them and kept hiring from Lebanon. Dubai Media City later gave the industry purpose-built towers and a concentration of talent that Beirut, by the accounts of its own executives, could not match.

Two features of this history matter for the present.

The first is that the community was portable.

It was held together by people, relationships, and shared craft, not by a city. When conditions changed, it relocated more or less intact.

The second is that each move followed a specific pull. Cyprus offered safety. Dubai offered stability, infrastructure, and proximity to clients with growing budgets. The community went where it could work.

The second community: built on a platform, not a place

By the early 2010s, a different kind of creative community was forming, and it did not need an office at all.

In Amman, a group of animators and designers founded Kharabeesh in 2008. The name means "scribbles." It began as a collective, moved from animation into comedy and social content, and became the region's first YouTube-certified multi-channel network. It later expanded into Jeddah.

In Riyadh, three young men launched Telfaz11 on 14 September 2011. The name combined the Arabic word for television with the year its founders believed a new creative era had begun. Their thesis was simple. Saudi youth were not seeing themselves on television, so they would make content for them in their own voice and publish it where they already were.

Around the same time, a small group of filmmakers formed the Talashi Film Collective. They made short films and screened them at festivals in neighbouring countries, roughly a decade before cinemas reopened in Saudi Arabia in 2017.

None of these groups were waiting for permission or infrastructure. The platform supplied distribution. The audience supplied feedback, instantly and publicly. The community supplied everything else: training, criticism, collaboration, and, eventually, careers.

This is the clearest evidence against a purely economic explanation of creative communities. It is tempting to argue that communities are simply a byproduct of advertising spend, and that talent gathers wherever budgets accumulate. The Beirut-to-Dubai story fits that explanation reasonably well. The YouTube generation does not. In Riyadh and Amman, the community formed before the money, and the money followed the audiences that the community had already built.

It would be wrong, however, to romanticise this period as purely independent. Kharabeesh raised angel funding in 2011 and a Series B round in 2016. Telfaz11 still runs a client-facing creative division that produces branded work, which helps fund its larger productions. Commerce was present from the start. What was absent was an institutional frame around it.

The institutions arrive

The current moment is different in kind, not only in scale.

In April 2024, dentsu MENA received a regional headquarters licence in Riyadh and described itself as the first of the major advertising holding companies to do so. Campaign Middle East noted at the time that the move aligned with Saudi rules requiring companies to have a local base in order to work on government contracts. Monks, the digital advertising company within S4 Capital, later relocated its Middle East headquarters from Dubai to Riyadh.

The commercial logic is visible in the numbers. One market research estimate puts Riyadh-based accounts at around 54% of Saudi agency revenue in 2025, concentrated among government entities, national headquarters, and Vision 2030 programmes. A report by Gmedia and Oxford Business Group projected Saudi ad spend at SAR 9.4 billion in 2025, a 10.5% increase on the previous year.

The recognition structure is moving as well. Athar, the Saudi Festival of Creativity, launched in Riyadh in 2023. Its awards are verified by Cannes Lions and Dubai Lynx. Its organisers report that attendance grew from roughly 1,000 delegates at the first edition to more than 3,000 by its third. The fourth edition takes place in Riyadh in November 2026. Dubai Lynx itself now runs a dedicated Riyadh edition of its Young Lynx Academy for early-career talent.

Formal education is following. In September 2025, the Ministry of Culture announced the Riyadh University of Arts, intended to train talent for the creative and cultural economy. The ministry's own State of Culture report counted 283,000 workers in cultural professions in 2025, an 8% increase on the previous year.

And the market for individual creators has been regulated. Since 2022, anyone earning from promotional content on social media in Saudi Arabia has needed a Mawthooq licence from the General Authority for Media Regulation. Non-Saudi creators must work through licensed local agencies. Industry reporting citing Kolsquare's regional research estimates that the active commercial influencer pool contracted by about 35% after the system was introduced.

Taken together, these are not the conditions of a community forming in a gap. They are the conditions of an industry being constructed on purpose.

What the awards actually show

Award results are an imperfect measure of a creative community, but they are a public one, and they reveal both the shift and its limits.

At Dubai Lynx 2024, Saudi Arabia won five Grands Prix, its highest total at the festival to that point. Four of them went to a single campaign for Saudia by Leo Burnett Jeddah. In 2025, BigTime Creative Shop in Riyadh won three Grands Prix for Riyadh Season, and VML Riyadh took the Creative Effectiveness Grand Prix for HungerStation.

At the 2026 ceremony, held on 8 October, VML Riyadh won four Grands Prix, each for a different campaign, including the Grand Prix for Good. Publicis KSA shared the Media and Outdoor Grand Prix for Saudia. Kuwait won its first Grand Prix in the festival's history.

Yet the same results complicate any simple narrative of a shift from Dubai to Riyadh. The most awarded agencies of 2026 were still based in Dubai. Saatchi & Saatchi Middle East recorded 31 awards. FP7 McCann Dubai recorded 20. The Design Grand Prix went to a campaign for Saudia, a Saudi national carrier, created by Landor in Dubai.

That pattern suggests something more precise than relocation. Saudi clients have become central to the region's creative output. Saudi-based agencies are now winning at the top level. But a large share of the craft, the senior talent, and the agency infrastructure still sits in Dubai, serving Saudi briefs from across the border. The centre of gravity is moving, but the community has not moved with it in one piece, as it did in earlier eras.

The awards themselves are also adapting to a different kind of practitioner. For 2026, Dubai Lynx renamed its Social & Influencer category as Social & Creator and added five sub-categories. In Riyadh this week, the agenda of Campaign's Saudi Briefing includes a session on the move from influencer campaigns to creator ecosystems. The industry is formally recognising the type of community that YouTube produced a decade earlier.

The mechanism: three things communities follow

Looking across these episodes, creative communities in the region appear to have followed three conditions. This is an interpretation drawn from the pattern rather than an established law, but it explains the evidence reasonably well.

The first is clients. The Lebanese diaspora went where regional budgets were concentrated, and the current movement into Riyadh follows government and corporate spending, reinforced by rules that make local presence a condition of access.

The second is legitimacy. Communities need a way to recognise their own best work and signal it to clients. For decades, that function sat in Dubai, through Dubai Lynx, which has run since 2007. Athar is a deliberate attempt to build a parallel source of recognition at home.

The third is room to experiment. This is the condition the YouTube generation had in abundance. Production was cheap, distribution was free, and an audience could validate an idea before any client or jury did. In 2013, one UTURN writer observed that an episode briefly removed from YouTube saw its views rise sharply when it returned. The space was not unregulated, but it was loose enough for an unknown team to build an audience from nothing.

Riyadh is now strong on the first two conditions. The open question is the third.

The tension inside formalisation

Institutions raise the floor of an industry. Licensing makes paid content more transparent to consumers. Regional headquarters bring senior talent, training programmes, and international standards into the country. A home festival gives local practitioners a stage that does not require a flight to Dubai. These are real gains, and they are not trivial for a workforce in which most new entrants are young and early in their careers.

But formalisation also changes who gets to enter. A licence is a cost and a gate. A festival is a curated stage with an agenda, sponsors, and organisers who are themselves commercial players; Athar is presented by Motivate Media Group, a UAE-based publisher, and TRACCS, a Saudi communications consultancy. Regional headquarters attract experienced professionals who often arrive through established networks rather than through the open, informal channels that produced the YouTube generation.

None of this is evidence that experimentation is disappearing. Telfaz11 itself is the strongest counterexample. It began outside every institution and is now part of the formal film industry, producing commercial hits and committing significant capital to Saudi production. The system absorbed the outsider rather than excluding it.

The more useful question is whether that path remains open for the next group. Telfaz11 began when the barriers to a Saudi audience were almost zero and the institutions had not yet been built. A comparable team starting in 2026 faces a more organised market, with clearer rules, larger incumbents, and more professional competition for attention. That market may be more stable and more fair. It may also be harder to enter from the outside.

What this reveals

The history of Arab creative communities is often told as a story of hubs: Beirut, then Dubai, now Riyadh. The evidence suggests a slightly different reading.

For most of the past half century, these communities were defined by their portability. They formed around people and craft, and they relocated when conditions demanded it, from Beirut to Cyprus to Dubai, or from television to YouTube. Their strength came from not depending on any single place or institution.

What is new in Riyadh is not the existence of a creative community. It is the attempt to make one rooted: tied to a city through licences, headquarters, universities, and a home stage for recognition. Rootedness offers things the region's creative class has rarely had, including continuity, domestic clients, and a career path that does not require emigration. It also introduces something the region's most inventive communities rarely faced at their beginnings: a fully built system to enter.

The measure of success, then, may not be the number of awards Saudi agencies win, or the number of headquarters that move. It may be whether the next team without a licence, a festival invitation, or an agency badge can still find enough room to build an audience, and whether the institutions now being built are designed to notice them when they do.

Disclosure: Arabian Growth is published by Arbaaa, a Riyadh-based strategic communications and reputation advisory firm that operates in the market described in this article.

Sources

Notes for fact-check

Saudi YouTube figures (2013): reported consistently by LRB and VOA. Original data came from YouTube and comScore. Confirm the primary source before print.
54% Riyadh share of agency revenue: a commercial research estimate (Ken Research). Keep it attributed as an estimate.
35% contraction of the influencer pool: secondary reporting of Kolsquare research. Obtain the Kolsquare report directly or soften the claim.
UTURN episode removal and view increase: from a single 2013 LRB account. Keep it attributed.
Legal review: the sections on Mawthooq and regional HQ rules describe regulation. Route them through Saudi legal-risk review per house standards.