Shubbak Festival 2025
Shubbak Festival is Europe’s largest biennial of contemporary Arab cultures, showcasing a vibrant mix of artists across London. As Director of Marketing and Communications, I lead the festival’s marketing, content, and brand strategy—shaping messaging across music, theatre, fashion, and visual arts. I oversee integrated, multi-channel campaigns to drive ticket sales, audience growth, membership, and brand awareness, while also supporting fundraising and income generation initiatives. I manage a creative team and lead on co-branded partnership campaigns with organisations such as SXSW London, Southbank Centre, Barbican, and Rich Mix, ensuring maximum reach, engagement, and alignment with our mission to champion Arab voices.
Services
Marketing Communications Strategy, Audience Development, Branding, PR, Digital Marketing, Campaign Mangaement
Year
2024 - Present
Project Overview
Objective
For Shubbak Festival’s 8th edition, I was tasked with developing and executing the marketing communications strategy to promote a rich and diverse programme of contemporary Arab arts and culture. Faced with the heightened significance of running the festival amid devastating events unfolding across the Arab region, Shubbak 2025 carries a crucial responsibility. The key objective was to increase the festival’s visibility and broaden its audience reach
Insights
Shubbak Festival aims for Arab communities to form the core of its audiences. While engagement has grown, data still shows a predominance of middle-class attendees—reflecting wider challenges around access and inclusion. To address this, Shubbak has built long-term community partnerships and led targeted, narrative-driven campaigns. Audience development remains central, with a focus on representation, affordability, outreach, and multilingual content.
Strategy
Shubbak launched a longer-lead campaign to maximise visibility, with a refreshed festival identity that felt culturally authentic and modern. We introduced assisted ticket schemes, targeted diverse audiences beyond traditional arts press, and partnered with community connectors to shape inclusive, relevant messaging. The multi-channel campaign spanned digital, print, social media, PR, and outreach.
Branding
For Shubbak 2025, I led the brand direction and developed the creative concept, briefing designers to push beyond the safe, Westernised visual territory of previous editions. The aim was to carve out a bold, culturally authentic identity that truly reflected the richness, complexity and joy of contemporary Arab culture—something that had previously felt like a missing link.The new direction, themed around Arab Futurism, was rooted in dreaming of the future we want to see. In the face of political turmoil and ongoing devastation in the Arab world, the brand needed to act as a beacon, offering light, comfort, and imagination. We explored dreams as a motif: representations of emotions, unconscious desires, and collective visions.
The identity was designed to look forward while holding space for the past—drawing on vintage Arab music covers and posters to inspire something joyful, pop-infused, bold, and contemporary. This was more than a visual refresh—it marked the start of Shubbak taking its brand seriously. It set the stage for a future organisational rebrand and repositioned the festival as a pioneering platform for Arab creativity. The identity also had to resonate with younger audiences, particularly Gen Z, whose aesthetic sensibilities and activism are central to the festival’s future.
Website & Digital
I led the preparation and delivery of Shubbak’s website for its 2025 festival launch, overseeing both strategic setup and day-to-day functionality. This included shifting the site into ‘festival mode’ ahead of the full programme announcement and coordinating the onsale for each event in the festival. Working closely with a web agency, I managed technical development and implementation—ensuring the site was mobile-responsive, accessible, and functional across both English and Arabic language versions. I created and populated individual event pages, uploaded multimedia content, and collaborated with artists and partners to ensure all listings were accurate, up to date, and aligned with campaign messaging. A key part of this process involved implementing and adapting the new festival brand identity for web use—ensuring it came across cohesively across event pages, imagery, copy, and overall digital UX. I revised page layouts, messaging, and visual assets to reflect the 2025 identity, prioritising clarity, consistency, and cultural nuance .
Social Media
I led the rollout of Shubbak Festival’s 2025 social media campaign, launching activity four months ahead of the festival with a phased strategy beginning with ‘Save the Date’ messaging. The goal was to steadily build audience anticipation, support the wider marketing timeline, and ensure the new brand identity was reflected cohesively across all platforms. Working closely with designers, I briefed and commissioned a broad suite of branded assets tailored for social media—designed to bring the new festival identity to life online. This included content spotlighting individual artists and shows, full festival line-up graphics, ‘Book Now’ visuals, and weekly ‘What’s On’ graphics that helped guide audiences through the evolving programme. In addition, Instagram Reels and branded image templates were created to document and promote each act throughout the festival period. Each piece of content was planned with intention—to showcase the vibrancy and breadth of the festival while maintaining clarity, consistency, and cultural authenticity.
Email Newsletters
Email remained a key pillar of our digital marketing strategy, supporting each major milestone in the Shubbak Festival 2025 campaign. From exclusive programme reveals to targeted show promotions, our approach was designed to drive early engagement, encourage ticket sales, and ensure our subscribers felt closely connected to the festival journey. We launched with priority booking emails for members, followed by pre-launch teasers and the official festival programme announcement. Throughout the campaign, we used newsletters not only to promote the festival overall but also to spotlight specific artists, events, and themes—ensuring each message felt relevant, timely, and culturally resonant. Subscribers were given first access to news and updates, positioning the mailing list as an insider channel and driving higher levels of engagement.
As we approach the festival period, our campaign cadence will increase to three emails per week. This includes weekly “What’s On” roundups, festival highlight emails, and targeted campaigns designed to boost sales for underperforming events. Our email activity will continue throughout the festival, with pre-show updates, real-time notifications for live events, and end-of-week recaps incorporating audience feedback and testimonials. This is to ensure our communications remain fresh and responsive,
Content
Shubbak’s content strategy for the 2025 festival was built around a dynamic mix of new commissions and artist-supplied material, balancing promotional goals with our commitment to artist visibility and authenticity. We collaborated closely with artists to honour their creative vision, platform their work, and ensure they had a sense of ownership in how their shows were presented to the public. The strategy incorporated a wide range of mixed-media formats—including long-form and short-form video, photography, designed assets, and written content—rolled out across channels in the lead-up to and during the festival.
One of our anchor assets was a pre-festival promo trailer, designed to build early momentum across our website, social media, email campaigns, and paid advertising. Alongside this, billboard campaigns across London helped capture attention to drive London audiences to the festival. A series of show-specific graphics and trailers added depth to the campaign, while content was also adapted into Arabic to ensure accessibility and inclusivity across our audiences.
Throughout the festival itself, new content will continue to be captured and shared—including event photography and videography, artist interviews, audience feedback, press coverage, and real-time social media content. A post-festival trailer will serve as a wrap-up of the programme’s key moments, offering a legacy asset that reflects both the vibrancy of the festival and its wider impact.
Campaign Partners
Shubbak Festival 2025 is proudly collaborating with a range of leading brands, arts venues, and cultural institutions across London and internationally. These partnerships are instrumental in amplifying our shared commitment to showcasing global diasporic creativity and engaging underserved communities—core pillars of Shubbak’s mission. In the run-up to the festival launch, we have been working closely with these partners to deliver coordinated campaign activity, including press releases, social media content, launch events, and cross-promotional initiatives. This ongoing collaboration ensures a cohesive and powerful presence across platforms, maximizing reach and impact while reinforcing the festival’s message and values.
