From MbS to MbSOS? Saudi Arabia, advertising, and national image

Artwork by Tarek Chemaly, first released as cover of ArabAd in 2024

Trojena Ski Village? Webuild Dam & Lake Project? The Line Tunnel? Moonlight Desalination Plant? The Mukaab? NEOM giga-project? Their common link? Saudi Projects costing several billions each which are either being scaled down, curtailed, or outright stopped. In 2023 I wrote about Ronaldo being a cheap propaganda instrument for KSA (here), and how Messi was also a Messy instrument for Saudi tourism (here), Saudia was flying on turbo engines when they did this flawed ad (here). What I am trying to say is that the kingdom was formerly really thriving, between the (now questionable) 2034 FIFA football bid, the major effort injected in glowing image the kingdom and add to it the Georgina Rodriguez effect (Ronaldo's now wife, formerly girlfriend, who was allowed to live with him despite them not being married in addition to her Holsten campaign - here), without forgetting the multitude of shows and awards - now left by the wayside (the joy awards were postponed (read cancelled) this year along with the Red Sea Festival which was supposed to place the cinema in the Kingdom at the forefront of world events).

For a long while, if you read any press release coming from the kingdom the sentence "in compliance with the 2030 vision" was a mandate. You couldn't escape it, or go around it, or not include it, no matter what your campaign or product or was. Everything had to be in line with it. Then AI came, then the war came between the US and Iran came, then political and geographical instability came, a perfect storm on all fronts which affected oil production and transit via the straight of Hormuz, the bombing of the airport, and all other cataclysms leading to the announcement today that the UK Royal Air Force is deploying Typhoon FGR4 fighter jets, an A400M Atlas transport plane, and a Voyager tanker to Saudi Arabia to conduct defensive counter-air missions against Houthi drone and missile strikes. 

Read that again.

Advertising is one of the first casualties anywhere in any upheaval in the world. Six months before the 2019 crash in Lebanon, the industry started feeling all the effects as the Dollar was beginning to wobble. In KSA and the Gulf at large, communication (advertising, marketing, PR, etc....) agencies are shedding employees by the bucketload. Just yesterday, the head of a major production firm with heavy presence in KSA told me "between AI, the war, and the infinitely shrinking client budgets we are squeezed on all fronts, thankfully I am Canadian, I can always go flip burgers there for all I care."

KSA is more acute, simply because, by injecting so much money in projects - which as I pointed out earlier are either shrinking or being cancelled outright - and by wanting to go toe to toe with the UAE (let's face it, they did want that) they were deploying heavy artillery (sorry for the pun) even if it went against the grain of everything the kingdom defended in its ultra Wahabi era.

So with the communication sector hit so fiercely, with the national image troubled, with all these glowing meetings and festivals and events and landmarks in jeopardy, Mohammad bin Salman, known as MbS, seems to have gone to MbSOS mode.