Sitting where business and taste meet.
Content and cultural strategy across entertainment and brand storytelling.
Over twenty years in MENA.
what lingers... is where I think out loud about it all, films, series, brands, campaigns, songs, anything that stays with me.
Hi. I'm Zeina.
I've spent over twenty years understanding how to talk to audiences and what makes them listen. The medium changes: brand, screen, cultural institutions, writing. The underlying question doesn't.
The first decade was brand and audience work: advertising and integrated campaigns at Leo Burnett and Impact BBDO for Shell, Hilton, and HP; brand strategy at Eleven for Mubadala, Raffles and Abu Dhabi Municipality; then leading marketing for Majid Al Futtaim's malls, where I repositioned Mirdif City Centre from transactional retail to a community cultural space.
The second decade moved into screen. I built VOX Studios' Arabic film division from the ground up, greenlit and executive produced Voy! Voy! Voy! (Egypt's 2024 Oscar submission and grossed over $6M), and led development at Alamiya Filmed Entertainment. I've championed projects the industry hesitated on, and passed on ones that didn't go on to find their audience. Alongside, consulting for Barker Langham, the Royal Film Commission Jordan, Film Industry Days, and the Rawi/Sundance Screenwriters Lab, and teaching media literacy at the American University of Sharjah.
My PhD at SOAS was on how Arab film uses sound, editing, genre and mise-en-scène subversively, how films shape what an audience feels before they know they're feeling it. Before that, my Leeds MA was one of the region's earliest academic studies of YouTube and digital audiences in the Arab world. The same questions still drive most of what I do.
What I'm actually good at is sitting where business and taste meet. Knowing which stories and insights will land. Reading a script and seeing why it won't travel. Reading a market, or a dataset, and finding the signal that matters. Watching something and being unable to shake it, then understanding why.
Most of that last part lives over at what lingers...
In a year, repositioned Mirdif City Centre from a transactional retail destination into a space with a community identity, a place people came to be, not just to buy.
Built that identity through layered cultural programming: a recycled-fashion runway with GEMS schoolchildren during Dubai Fashion Weekend (reaching approximately 36,000 students with no paid spend, and earning 500K AED in earned coverage including a national television feature), a Monday Sobhiya auction breakfast partnering with mall retailers for curated F&B and age-segmented and curated entertainment, student art from local schools displayed in the central atrium, and a Ramadan content campaign that broadened the audience by anchoring it in shared values rather than a single faith.
Underneath all of it: a then (2011) unusual digital presence. Mirdif City Centre was among the first malls in the region to take social seriously, Facebook followers grew from 200 to over 20,000 in less than a year through ongoing cultural and seasonal content, before mall marketing in MENA had meaningfully moved online.
Not through media spend only. Through giving people something to belong to.
Feel free to reach out at zeina@zeinashanaah.com