Eight Nominations. Zero Surprises.

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TIDAL’s MENA Search Awards shortlist proves what happens when you stop playing agency games and start building empires.

Five trophies at the Global Search Awards last month. Eight nominations at MENA this week. At this rate, we’ll need a bigger office. Not for the metal – for the clients queuing up to understand how we turned a livestock company into a category killer.

Here’s the thing about award nominations: they’re usually participation trophies for agencies who confuse activity with achievement. Pretty campaigns that win pitches but lose money. Creative that forgets commerce exists. Work that makes CMOs happy and CFOs homicidal.

Our eight MENA nominations are different. They’re for campaigns that did something revolutionary: they delivered.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Performance Marketing

While everyone else was “disrupting” and “innovating” (translation: burning budgets on branded content nobody watched), we were doing something deeply unfashionable. We were making money. For clients. Consistently. Measurably. Boringly.

Except it wasn’t boring at all.

The Livestock Revolution Nobody Saw Coming

MLS – Muscat Livestock. Two nominations.

A meat company in Oman. Not exactly Silicon Valley’s next unicorn. Most agencies would have created some “farm-to-table storytelling” and called it a day. We saw something else: a category with no leader, consumers with no loyalty, and competitors still advertising like it’s 1995.

Six months later, MLS doesn’t compete in FMCG. They dominate it. Try searching for premium meat in Oman now. Try finding anyone else. That’s not PPC. That’s a coup.

The judges nominated us for Best FMCG and Best PPC Campaign. We call it Wednesday afternoon’s work.

The Boat Show That Became a Gravitational Field

Dubai International Boat Show. Four nominations.

Yes, the same campaign that won at the Global Search Awards. Because when you turn a trade show into the region’s unmissable luxury event, people notice. Repeatedly.

Best Travel/Leisure (PPC)
Best Local Campaign
Best Integrated Campaign
Best Use of Making Everyone Else Look Amateur

(Fine, we made that last one up. But we should have won it.)

Here’s what nobody understands about luxury marketing: wealth doesn’t search. It discovers. It gets pulled into orbits. It finds itself signing seven-figure contracts without quite remembering how it got there.

So we built a black hole. PPC that didn’t feel like advertising. Social that felt like insider knowledge. Content that understood the difference between someone who likes boats and someone who collects yachts.

The result? The right people, in the right marina, writing the right cheques.

The Rolls-Royce Reality Check (Now With Added Robots)

Two nominations. One uncomfortable truth.

Everyone talks about AI in marketing. Nobody admits it’s mostly bollocks. Chatbots that can’t chat. Algorithms that can’t think. “Machine learning” that’s neither.

We did something radical. We used AI for what it’s actually good at: finding patterns humans miss. Not to replace strategy, but to weaponise it. Our Rolls-Royce campaign didn’t just use AI – it used it properly. To find the infinitesimal percentage of people who don’t just want a Rolls-Royce but are about to buy one.

Best Automotive Campaign. Best Use of AI in Search. Best Example of What Happens When You Stop Treating AI Like Magic and Start Treating It Like Maths.

The Finance Campaign That Didn’t Bore Anyone to Death

mimojo. One nomination. Infinite relief.

Financial services marketing is where creativity goes to die. Compliance departments that say no to everything. Legal teams that remove every word worth reading. Brands that think “trustworthy” means “tedious.”

We fixed that. Not by being wacky (compliance hates wacky). But by being clear. Direct. Human. By remembering that behind every financial decision is a person who’d rather be doing literally anything else than comparing cashback rates.

The result? A PPC campaign that cut through the beige. Leads that actually converted. And a nomination that proves finance marketing doesn’t have to be financial marketing.

Why We’re Not Celebrating (Yet)

Eight nominations aren’t victories. They’re vindication. Proof that our approach – this apparently radical idea that marketing should make money – actually works.

But here’s what these nominations really represent: the death of the old agency model. The one that separates “brand” from “performance” like they’re different religions. The one that thinks creativity and commerce are enemies. The one that celebrates awareness but can’t spell acquisition.

We don’t do brand OR performance. We do brand-led performance. We build businesses that don’t compete because they’ve already won. The kind that own categories so completely that competitors become irrelevant.

The Numbers That Matter (And the Ones That Don’t)

Every agency talks about results. Here’s what they mean:

Impressions (translation: people who scrolled past)
Engagement (translation: accidental clicks)
Reach (translation: theoretical humans who theoretically might have theoretically noticed)

Here’s what we mean:

Revenue multiples, not percentage improvements
Category ownership, not market share
Clients who become uncatchable, not just competitive

We’d share specific numbers, but our clients’ competitive advantages aren’t conference content. Let’s just say: when mimojo’s competitors wonder what happened, when MLS’s category becomes their surname, when Rolls-Royce finds buyers instead of browsers – that’s not luck. That’s strategy.

The TIDAL Difference (Or: Why Everyone Else Is Still Drowning)

Here’s what happens at most agencies:

Win pitch with bold strategy
Panic about delivering bold strategy
Retreat to safe tactics
Celebrate meaningless metrics
Submit award entry about “transformation”
Repeat until client fires you

Here’s what happens at TIDAL:

Identify category nobody owns
Build strategy to own it
Execute like the business depends on it (because it does)
Measure what matters (money)
Get nominated for awards we didn’t chase
Use nominations to prove the model works
Sign clients who want dominance, not participation trophies

What Happens on November 19th

The MENA Search Awards ceremony. Black tie. Nervous laughter. Agencies pretending they don’t care while secretly dying inside.

We’ll be there. But not for the reasons you think.

We’re not going for the trophies (though we’ll take them). We’re going to watch an industry slowly realise that the game has changed. That performance without brand is just direct response with a degree. That brand without performance is just expensive poetry. That the agencies winning aren’t the ones with the best creative – they’re the ones whose clients can’t be Googled without finding them first.

The Brief We’re Writing for 2026

Stop asking for awareness. Start demanding ownership. Stop measuring engagement. Start measuring dominance. Stop competing. Start conquering.

The old playbook is dead. We killed it. With livestock and luxury cars. With boats and banking. With eight nominations that prove one simple truth:

When you stop playing the agency game and start playing the business game, you don’t just win awards. You win markets.

Ready to stop being searchable and start being unavoidable?

Let’s talk. But only if you’re serious about category domination.

P.S. – To our competitors studying these nominations trying to figure out our secret: It’s not a secret. We just decided that making clients money was more important than making ourselves look clever. Revolutionary, we know.

P.P.S. – November 19th. Dubai. Watch this space. Or don’t. We’ll be too busy building the next eight campaigns to notice.

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