New data from AI marketing platform Adly shows that Gulf businesses are overwhelmingly choosing Arabic over English for their advertising, even when the brand name itself is written in English, according to Communicate. That detail is the interesting part. A business can carry an English name on its signage and still decide that the conversation with its customers belongs in Arabic.
It would be easy to read this as a simple preference, a nod to local pride or regulation. But it points to something more practical about how people receive advertising. A name is a label. An advert is a conversation. And conversations tend to land better in the language someone thinks in, jokes in, and complains to their family in, regardless of what's printed on the shopfront.
This is where the habit of translating international campaigns for Gulf markets runs into trouble. A campaign built around English wordplay, pacing, and references to an English speaking audience doesn't become local just because someone swaps the words for Arabic equivalents. Humor doesn't always survive translation. Neither does rhythm, or the kind of phrase that feels natural and local. Brands that treat Arabic copy as a translation task, rather than a separate creative exercise, often end up with ads that are technically correct and emotionally flat.
The reverse mistake exists too. Some brands lean so hard into Arabic that they lose the register their audience expects from them, especially audiences who move fluently between both languages every day. Many people across Oman and the wider Gulf move fluently between Arabic and English every day, often within the same conversation. The point isn't to pick one language and stay loyal to it forever. It's to understand which language does the work for a given message, a given audience, and a given moment.
That understanding doesn't come from a style guide. It comes from knowing how people in Muscat or Dubai or Riyadh talk about the things a brand sells, what tone feels respectful versus distant, and where humor is welcome and where it isn't. A campaign line that works in London because it's self deprecating can read as odd or even disrespectful once it's rendered word for word in Arabic. None of this means the underlying idea has to change. It means the execution has to be built with the local audience in mind from the start.
I'd argue the Adly data is less about language choice and more about what language choice reveals: that Gulf businesses, including many with international names and ambitions, still see their customers' first language as the one that carries meaning, not just information. That's a reasonable instinct, and it's one marketers outside the region sometimes underestimate when they assume a global campaign only needs a light local layer on top.
None of this is an argument against global brand consistency. A recognizable look, a consistent tone of voice, a shared visual identity, these things have real value across markets. The issue isn't consistency itself. It's assuming that consistency can be achieved by translation alone, when Gulf audiences seem to be responding to the language they actually use day to day, not just the one a global template defaults to.
There's also a cost question worth raising. Building separate creative for Arabic and English isn't free, and not every brand has the budget or the local expertise to do it well. Smaller businesses in Oman, in particular, may feel the pressure to simply translate what head office sends over because it's faster and cheaper. That pressure is understandable. But the Adly findings suggest that the market itself is already voting with its advertising choices, and the direction of that vote is worth paying attention to before deciding translation is good enough.
For any brand operating in Oman or the wider Gulf, the practical step isn't choosing Arabic or English and committing to it everywhere. It's testing whether a campaign's core idea, its humor, its tone, its central promise, survives being rebuilt in the language the audience lives in.
Sources
- Gulf businesses favour Arabic advertising despite English brand names, data shows — Communicate, 3 Nov 2026
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