The Gulf (GCC) playbook

01What this market buys

GCC agencies and in-house teams buy Arabic-first volume for retail, F&B, beauty, automotive and government-adjacent work. Riyadh and Doha are buying the same shape of content as Dubai, two years behind it — which is why a block priced for the region travels, and why a single-city supplier runs out of relevant case studies quickly.

02The language layer

Arabic is the primary track, English the second, and the order matters: write the Arabic hook first and let the English follow, not the other way round. Gulf dialect for lifestyle and retail, MSA for corporate and government. Numerals, price format and courier naming all differ from the European defaults a foreign supplier will reach for, and each of those is visible to the audience on the first frame.

03What the money looks like

The GCC anchor is the dirham, pegged at 3.6725 to the dollar, so a dollar card translates without drift — and because the peg holds, a price quoted in AED today means the same thing next quarter. That is not true of every market on this site, and it is why the Gulf is the easiest region to quote into and the easiest to forecast a season from.

04What decides the job

• The Ramadan windowEveryone wants the same studio in the same four weeks. Producing the bulk in December and January is the advantage, and it is only available to a supplier whose capacity is not a crew.
• Language orderArabic-first hooks outperform translated ones. The order is a production decision made at the brief, not a formatting choice made at delivery.
• VAT by stateUAE 5%, KSA 15%, Qatar and Kuwait currently none. Two or three invoices, two or three treatments, one published card.

05What goes wrong

The mistake is treating the GCC as one market with one dialect and one tax rate. It is six states, and the two that matter most do not share a tax rate, a dialect, or a media calendar.