I sat in a meeting last month where a brand team presented their "2026 marketing calendar." Twelve campaigns. Twelve separate narratives. Twelve fresh starts.

And I realized: we're still planning like it's 2016.

The campaign model is dead in Saudi Arabia. We just haven't admitted it yet.

For twenty years, marketing in this region followed a predictable rhythm. Launch a campaign. Run it for 8-12 weeks. Measure. Optimize. Move to the next one. Rinse and repeat. It worked because the market itself was relatively stable. Consumer behavior changed slowly. Competitive landscapes shifted incrementally.

That world is gone my friends.

When the country is simultaneously building a $500 billion city, transforming into a tourism destination, creating an entertainment industry from scratch, and reshaping its economic foundation, you can't market in three-month intervals, have 4 "large" campaigns, 6 "medium" ones, and 5 adhoc "seasonal" bursts. The ground is moving too fast for the status quo.

Vision 2030 isn't a campaign. NEOM isn't a campaign. The transformation of Saudi society isn't a campaign. These are ecosystems. Living, evolving narratives that compound over years, not quarters.

Yet most brands are still thinking in bursts. An activation at a season here. A National Day campaign there. A product launch next quarter. Each treated as a discrete event, disconnected from what came before and what comes after.

Here's what ecosystem thinking actually means: Your brand narrative needs to be a thread, not a series of knots.

When Aramco talks about energy transition, they're not running a campaign, they're positioning themselves within a decades-long story about the Kingdom's economic evolution. When Roshn talks about communities, they're not selling units, they're articulating a vision of Saudi urban life that will unfold over the next fifteen years.

This requires a fundamentally different approach to how we work. You can't brief an agency on an "ecosystem" and expect a deck back in two weeks. You can't rotate brand managers every 18 months and expect narrative continuity. You can't optimize for quarterly performance metrics when you're building equity that won't fully materialize until 2028.

Unfortunately, the hardest part is convincing management that the most important marketing work you're doing this year might not show measurable results until next year. Or the year after.

But look around! The brands winning in Saudi Arabia right now aren't the ones with the best campaigns. They're the ones who understood early that they needed to build a position within the transformation itself, and then had the discipline to reinforce that position consistently, month after month, year after year.

I believe the question isn't whether the Q1 campaign will perform. The question is what story are you building for your brand that will matter in 2030?!