Rather than following the traditional agency model of subdividing by practices, the Dubai-born independent PR & Influencer Marketing agency has prioritized synergy and authenticity by creating four themed divisions that unite brands and team members who share common approaches to storytelling.

Gambit Pulse is focused on trends, disruption and passion, for brands that live in momentum and thrive on urgency, relevance and creative heat; Gambit Sage is the corporate, consultancy and sustainability division that offers calm, gravitas and strategic thinking, while Gambit Atelier is the fashion, culture and entertainment department that brings a studio mindset to a pop-culture world. Finally, Gambit fwd powers the industries and visionaries defining tomorrow in technology, property, mobility and innovation.

The divisions have been supplemented by a 26-person hiring spree that includes 21 new additions since the start of the year, and five more set to join before the end of the summer, to take the agency size to 50 full-time team members.

To help the teams live their ethos, Gambit has invested in two exciting new office spaces. The Gambit Pulse HQ is a purpose-built, fully-owned office space for the freshest young talent in the region to innovate, create and disrupt, while the Gambit Boutique is a bespoke fashion atelier designed to host, create content, and display clients’ brands. These line up alongside Gambit’s existing HQ which has been refurbished, to create a thriving 4,000 sq ft total premises.

Since the start of the year, Gambit have grown their multinational client roster with major tender wins including Samsung, Property Finder, Majid Al Futtaim’s Lifestyle portfolio featuring LEGO, lululemon, Crate & Barrel and more, The Red Sea International Airport in Saudi Arabia, and the global viral phenomenon FIX Dessert Chocolatier – the original Dubai Chocolate.

The agency’s powerful momentum sees them concurrently holding five agency of the year titles, following a successful 2024 where they picked up a total of 36 major awards.

Gambit Communications handles a range of multinational brands including Samsung, Uber, Acer, BMW, Amazon Payment Services, Majid Al Futtaim, Essilor Luxottica and more.

The win sees Gambit take on Samsung’s public relations remit across the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain and Oman, managing PR operations across multiple business units including smartphones, TVs, home appliances and others.

Gambit Communications kicked off the year with the announcement of six new hires, as it continues its expansion following an awards season that saw them win five agency of the year titles, and a flurry of new client wins including Uber, Deloitte, Emirates Airlines Festival of Literature, OMNIYAT and Essilor Luxottica Group.

The independent agency picked up 36 major awards during 2024, including winning the MENA Young Lions for the second successive year, and being named Medium Agency of the Year and Homegrown Agency of the Year at the MEPRA Awards 2024, PR Agency of the Year and Independent PR Agency of the Year at the Campaign Middle East Agency of the Year Awards 2024, and Medium Agency of the Year at the PRCA Regional Awards 2024.

The Dubai-born independent communications agency handles a range of multinational brands including Acer, BMW, Aramex, Amazon Payment Services, Porsche, Mandarin Oriental and more.

Mary Paulose, Senior English Editor is an Indian ex-journalist with 15 years of cross-functional editorial experience, including creating content for government, consumer, and corporate clients. In a stellar journalism career, she worked at The National, Gulf News, Khaleej Times, Times of Oman, and The New Indian Express, in addition to lifestyle magazines WKND and Faces Oman.

Reem Tamimi, Senior Account Executive is an Egyptian national, born and raised in Riyadh, and a graduate of the American University of Sharjah in Marketing and Management. She joins from Talabat Egypt, where she was Corporate Partnerships Manager.

Jala Hammouda, Account Executive is a Palestinian-Russian comms professional, born and raised in Belarus, with a marketing degree from the American University in Dubai, who has done brief stints in marketing, HR, and PR. She is trilingual and fluent in English, Arabic, and Russian.

Aisha Almawed, Account Executive is a British-Palestinian national raised in Dubai. She holds a bachelor’s degree in design management from The American University of Sharjah and a Diploma in Montessori Early Years from London with three years of experience in nursery management and one year of experience in client servicing.

Siobhan Eagles, Junior Account Executive is a British fresh graduate in Public Relations from Leeds Beckett University. She grew up in the Czech Republic, Japan, Kuwait, the UK, and UAE giving her an international perspective, and has already completed four international internships in PR.

Sara Al Dehni, Junior Account Executive is a Syrian fresh graduate in communications and journalism from the Canadian University Dubai, with stellar Magna Cum Laude honors and four years of part-time work in student enrolment under her belt.

Commenting on these announcements, Jamal Al Mawed, Gambit Communications’ Founder and Managing Director said, “The mark of a successful agency is not only in the clients it attracts, but its ability to discover, nurture and retain strong talent. Our strength is in our people, and I’m really excited to have these six new superstars on board at such a crucial phase in our growth.”

Dubai-born independent communications agency Gambit Communications handles a range of multinational brands including TikTok, Acer, BMW, Amazon Payment Services, Porsche, Mandarin Oriental, and more.

The Dubai-born independent communications agency is an award-winner in ESG comms for campaigns across a wide range of its ESG-focused clients such as Veolia, Sharjah Sustainable City, BBC Earth, Acer, and Porsche.

Jamal Almawed, Gambit Communications’ Founder and Managing Director said: “There is no question that sustainability is one of the most important focal points for brands across the world right now, and major events from EXPO 2020 to COP27 and COP28 are bringing a global focus to this topic in our region. One of our core agency philosophies is ‘one move ahead' and we believe that this type of expertise in the team allows our clients to remain one move ahead in their communications.”

Gambit Communications are currently triple ‘Agency of the Year' title holders, having been named Medium Agency of the Year at the 2022 PRCA Regional Awards, and Homegrown Agency of the Year and Small Agency of the Year at the 2021 Middle East Public Relations Association (MEPRA) Awards in the past 12 months. They are shortlisted for 38 awards at the upcoming 2022 MEPRA Awards next month including Large Agency of the Year.

 We spoke to Al Mawed to understand what Gambit brings to the industry.

What does Gambit focus on?

In one word: value. Not just value for money but value in terms of substance. We want to do results-oriented, intelligent work that has value and provides value for brands. For that you need intelligent, driven people, and that’s what we are focused on.  

From a technical standpoint, we are focused on three areas: Public Relations (full services – everything from media relations and crisis comms to CSR and content development), Social Media (full management of brands’ social media channels) and Influencer Engagement (everything from choosing the right influencers both paid and unpaid down to measurement and evaluation). 

Is that what we need in the current market?

To answer that question I think we first have to recognize that the Human Resources function has failed in the regional communications industry. There seems to be a very weak understanding of what skills you should be hiring for – PR and Social Media practitioners are not the same as doctors, engineers or programmers and cannot be evaluated the same way. As a result we are continuously seeing the wrong people being hired for client side and agency roles which results in a high turnover of staff on both sides and a vicious circle of bad recruitment when under qualified hires become decision makers.

We need agencies that know how to hire and develop the right people for your specific brand, and who can be long-term members of your extended team, not stop-gap solutions to ensure the retainer money keeps coming in. That’s what the market needs and that’s what we can provide better than anyone.

How does Gambit’s technique fill the gap within the ongoing talent gaps?

I think it was Simon Sinek who said “Good companies find skillful people and motivate them; great companies find motivated people and inspire them”. That really sums up how we approach the talent gap. You can teach skills to people but you can’t teach motivation and drive so we look for driven people and we aim to pay them well.

More importantly, our business model allows us to retain them for the client so that they aren’t constantly on-boarding new team members. As a locally owned, DED-licensed, independent agency, we don’t have overheads like franchise fees, holding group fees, expensive Free Zone rates, multiple partners and/or sponsors, shareholder profits, regional offices and multi-layered management structures crippling our overheads and eating away at our bottom line. As a result we can pass on a much higher percentage of revenue to the staff in the form of salaries, and that improves retention rates and staff performance.  I’ve seen agencies lose valued team members over an AED 1,000 salary raise – how can they not understand the amplified ‘opportunity cost’ of not making that AED 1,000 investment?

What sort of challenges do your clients face that you want to close?

I think all brands would agree that they want more time from their agency team members, more flexibility, and more focus on their brands. You can’t realistically achieve that with team members working on six or seven clients each, so we have a maximum cap of three brands per staff member.

Clients also want people who are all-rounders to give them an extra dimension, so we try to look for bilingual, creative, multicultural team members who are excited about what they do. We are in a digital age so everyone has to be equally competent with social or traditional platforms. 

In what way are you bringing in a new element within the market?

I remember in one of my client-side roles where I had a big-name agency, and a $25,000 monthly retainer was only enough to get me 20 percent each of an Account Manager and an Account Executive’s time. In another role my agency was lying to me about the individual time-dedication of each team member and loading them up with other clients behind my back because they couldn’t balance the books. This shows that there is something very wrong with the ‘big-agency’ mentality at the moment, and brands are starting to look for versatile, nimble, fresh agencies to fill that gap.

The second thing we are bringing is to completely abolish the whole concept of ‘hours’ and ‘hourly rates’. Unfortunately, even agencies that say they work on ‘deliverables’ instead of hours are actually linking those deliverables to ‘estimated hours’. I have never believed in a system where the brand has to worry about how long it takes their agency to do something in case they get charged for ‘over-servicing’.

Our business model is based on deliverables versus an agreed fee. How long it takes us to complete those deliverables is our problem, not the client’s. We are here to give peace of mind, and to do that we need to eliminate business systems that create stress and conflict.