The Campaign Was Beautiful. It Flopped.

The campaign was beautiful. The media plan was tight. The creative was on-brand. The brief had one clear objective: increase consideration by 12% among males 25-34 in Saudi Arabia.

It flopped.

Not because the creative was bad. Not because the media plan was off. It flopped because nobody in the room asked the second question. Or the third. Or the fourth.

The brief measured one thing. The team optimized for one thing. And the market, which is never one thing, did what markets do. It moved in five directions at once while the campaign pointed towards one.

This is the story of most marketing strategies in Saudi Arabia right now. Not because the people are incompetent. Because the thinking is flat.

I am firmly starting to believe that the brief is where the strategy goes to die

I’ve read thousands of briefs. And what most of them have in common is that they reduce a multi-layered challenge to a single metric and call it clarity *rolls eyes*.

Increase awareness they say. Drive consideration. Generate leads. Pick one. Optimize for it. Measure it. Report it. The team is proud, they are nailing it!

You see, the problem isn’t the metric. The problem is what gets left out when one number becomes the entire mission.

A brief that says “increase consideration by 12%” sounds focused. It is focused. But it is also blind. Blind to the cultural moment the campaign will launch into. Blind to the competitive moves happening simultaneously. Blind to the fact that the consumer it targets is not a data point in a funnel; she’s a 28-year-old Saudi lady whose expectations shifted three times in the last year alone. Blind to the internal realities: does the sales team even know this campaign is coming? Does aftersales have the capacity to handle what happens if it works?

The brief is where both the business and marketing strategies live or die. And right now, too many strategies are dead on arrival.

Marketing briefs in Saudi Arabia fail for three reasons, and they’re all related. Some are written in corner offices placed in high ivory towers, disconnected from the market they claim to understand. Some are written by people who were never trained in the art of briefing, because nobody teaches it, and everyone assumes it’s just “filling out the template.” And some, perhaps most, are briefs that never articulate a real problem. They describe a desired outcome without diagnosing why the current state exists.

A brief should be a multi-dimensional document. It should hold the commercial objective alongside the cultural context, the consumer emotional state, the competitive landscape, the organizational readiness, and the timing, all at once. Instead, most briefs are one-dimensional maps drawn for a three-dimensional terrain.

That’s where strategy dies. Before it ever had a chance.

Do you really think you know the “Saudi” consumer?

Here’s a dimension most marketers in the Kingdom are still catching up to: the consumer profile has shifted across gender, generation, and aspiration simultaneously. Not one at a time. All at once.

Saudi Arabia has one of the youngest populations on earth. 67% of the population is under 35[1]. This generation is simultaneously more global and more proudly Saudi than their parents ever were. They’ve grown up with ads in their feed since they were twelve. They detect insincerity the way previous generations detected the Maasoub needs more honey, instantly, and with zero tolerance.

And this generation moves fast. Their preferences shift faster than any quarterly planning cycle can accommodate. By the time your Q2 campaign is in market, the cultural reference you built it around is already stale.

The marketer who still targets “Saudi males 25-34” as a flat segment, with a flat brief, measured by a flat KPI, is playing a game that ended three to five years ago. The consumer has become multi-dimensional. So ask yourself, have you kept up? Do you really think you know the Saudi consumer? All of them?

Now is the part where I tell you what good looks like and you realize it's uncomfortably simple.

It’s not about being good at everything. That’s unrealistic and beside the point.

Multi-dimensional thinking, for a CMO, means holding brand positioning alongside cultural timing, consumer emotional state, media economics, competitive landscape, and organizational capability, in tension, simultaneously. Not sequentially. Not “we’ll consider the brand implications after we nail the media plan.” All of it, in the same room, at the same time.

I’ve never believed marketing should be a stand-alone silo. In every role, from running my own agency to advising government, ministries, and conglomorate groups, across more than ten industries, I’ve always pulled sales into the room. Aftersales. Finance. Operations. Anyone whose reality touches the consumer’s experience. Not because marketing can’t make its own decisions. It can. It should. But a marketing decision made without hearing from the people who deliver on its promise is, by definition, one-dimensional.

The automotive industry talks to sales. Banking talks to compliance. Telecom talks to pricing. But rarely does anyone talk to everyone at once. And that “at once” is the whole point.

When Aramco positions itself within Saudi Arabia’s energy transition narrative, that’s multi-dimensional. When STC calibrates its brand across youth culture, enterprise clients, and government partnerships simultaneously, that’s multi-dimensional. When a marketer looks at a brief and asks “what are the seven things this campaign will affect beyond the one thing it’s trying to measure?” That’s the reflex.

It’s a literacy across disciplines, not mastery of all of them. You don’t need to be a data scientist. You need to know enough about data to ask the right question. You don’t need to run a finance model. You need to know that your recommendation has financial implications that someone in the room should pressure-test.

Unfortunately, there is a hidden dimension nobody trains for.

Here’s the part that rarely makes it into a marketing conference keynote.

If you’ve reached the level of marketing leader, if you’re the one making the call, then your intuition should be right more often than it’s wrong. That’s part of what the promotion means. Or should mean.

But intuition doesn’t show up on a performance review. Nobody trains for it. Nobody even talks about it as a skill.

It is a skill. It requires cultivation the same way strategic thinking or creative judgment does. You build it through years of doing, failing, watching the market react in ways the data didn’t predict, and slowly, over hundreds of decisions, developing a sense for what will land and what won’t.

Most marketers rely entirely on what the dashboard says. The good ones balance the dashboard with the feeling in the room. The best ones know when the dashboard is lying, when the numbers tell a comforting story that masks an uncomfortable truth. Don’t mistake that for mysticism. This is experience through passion and hardship. And it’s one of the dimensions that separates a glorified marketing leader who manages campaigns from one who actually builds brands.

Few marketers have recognized this. Fewer have cultivated it. And that’s one of the reasons the same mistakes keep repeating.

A study published in 2025 confirmed that strategic thinking is inherently multidimensional, spanning how leaders approach competition, process information, make decisions, and adapt to change[2]. The research isn’t telling us anything the best CMOs don’t already feel. But it does confirm something worth stating: if your decision-making process runs on a single track, you are not thinking strategically. You are executing. There’s a difference.

So why do most marketers stay flat?

Two career patterns keep marketing leaders thinking in one dimension.

The first: never crossing the divide between agency and client. If you’ve spent your entire career on one side of the table, you’ve only ever seen half the picture. Agency-side, you see the creative challenge and the client’s brief. Client-side, you see the commercial pressure and the organizational constraints. Neither side alone gives you the full view. Crossing that divide, even once, changes how you think permanently.

The second: chasing titles instead of breadth. The industry rewards vertical promotions. Digital Manager becomes Digital Director becomes VP of Digital. Each step up narrows the lens further. The marketer becomes an expert in one discipline and a stranger to the rest. And then one day they’re CMO, responsible for everything, but equipped to think about only one slice of it.

Cross-disciplinary exposure is how multi-dimensional thinking develops. Not courses. Not frameworks. Exposure. Working across sectors. Working across functions. Seeing the same problem from a different chair.

And it’s buildable, for some. Not for everyone. It requires curiosity, fearlessness, and the stomach to be wrong many times before your gut earns the right to be trusted. 60% of leaders say decision-making is critical to their role, yet only 39% have ever been trained in it[3]. That gap is where flat thinking lives. Not in a lack of intelligence. In a lack of exposure.

There is one final step to overcome and it won’t be easy.

There is a tension that doesn’t get discussed enough. A CMO can think multi-dimensionally and still be blocked by a board that only reads one line on the P&L. A CEO who asks “what’s the ROI?” before asking “what’s the strategy?” creates an organization that structurally rejects multi-dimensional thinking.

I’ve been in those rooms. It required a lot of self-control from me to remain smiling and present. But that’s a topic for another day.

When faced with such tension, my approach has always been the same: show the cost of ignoring the other dimensions. Bring the evidence. When a one-dimensional decision fails, and it will, document it. Over time, the pattern becomes difficult to dismiss.

And bring other voices in as well. When sales sits next to marketing and says “this affects us too,” the CEO hears a different signal than when marketing says it alone.

But my golden rule is; I never go quiet. The moment you stop pushing for a wider view, you’ve accepted flat marketing. You’ve accepted that the brief is enough as written. You’ve accepted that one KPI tells the whole story.

It doesn’t. It never did. And in a market moving as fast as Saudi Arabia’s, one lens has never been less sufficient than it is right now.

That campaign I mentioned at the start? The beautiful one, the tight one, the one that flopped?

It would have worked if someone had asked the second question. If the brief had held more than one dimension. If the room had included more than one department. If the marketing leader behind it was humble enough to ask questions and sought advice from other disciplines and had been trained to think in layers rather than lines.

The campaign wasn’t the failure. The thinking was.

And the thinking is always where it starts.