Fault lines in the Kingdom 🇸🇦
Beneath the energy of Riyadh’s Athar Festival lies a familiar tension, reflecting the global PR industry’s own struggle to balance expansion, ownership, and reinvention.
To Riyadh, where more than 3,000 people gathered for a creative festival unlike most others. Now in its third year, the Athar Festival's rapid expansion reflects the burgeoning ambition at play in Saudi Arabia — where new projects and ideas emerge at a rapid clip, seemingly unencumbered by the legacies that weigh down other markets.
There is, accordingly, a sense of optimism and spirit that can seem mildly intoxicating, particularly amid the broader malaise that has enveloped the marcomms sector in other parts of the world. Few, at the festival at least, are visibly concerned about AI-fuelled automation, geopolitics or agency consolidation — these are just a few more factors that help determine a 21st century growth strategy.
Saudi's economic potential has hardly gone unnoticed among PR firms, who have flocked to the Kingdom in recent years. But their experiences tell us something about the tensions that accompany the region's rise, providing a useful reminder that this industry's streets are rarely paved with gold.