What is NEOM

CHALLENGE: Awareness of NEOM was rising. Understanding and credibility weren’t. The conversation was already happening, sceptical, often misinformed, and the brand platform wasn’t helping.
NEOM needed to enter it clearly and credibly.

INSIGHT: When people are sceptical, they search. And when they search, the algorithm shapes the narrative.

IDEA:Instead of fighting the noise, we leaned into it. We turned the question itself “What is NEOM?” into the campaign. People don’t read ads when they’re confused. They Google. So we built the answer into the places they were already looking. A SEO ecosystem that made credible, first and third-party content discoverable in the formats people prefer. Google liked the idea enough to let us use their search bar in the creative.

Film directed by Dave Meyers @ Radical Media.

Prefer video? There’s an explainer. Prefer reading? The site answers the big question and the smaller ones. Just want it in one line? It’s in the ad. For the generation that doesn’t use Google, the answers showed up on IG, and TikTok too.

The campaign worked well enough that the client asked for it to return the following year. We set up the strategic approach and wrote one of the three films “What is NEOM Doing for Business?”

Richard Park and Mike Outwhite wrote the other two and took it from there, elevating the execution and, it has to be said, choosing a much better soundtrack.