Hills Balfour opens in Dubai

October 14, 2022

Hills Balfour has opened a new office in Dubai to service the MENA region and beyond.

Hills Balfour International DMCC will include a fully integrated creative agency unit working across the group with resources in both Dubai and at Hills Balfour’s base in London – strengthening its ability to deliver end to end sales, marketing, branding and communication services for clients looking for a more integrated answer to more complex and diverse challenges. This is part of a larger long term plan to create specialist in-market teams that fuse together global best practice and tools with local knowledge, cultural insights and local delivery expertise – helping the most ambitious people and places globally to accelerate their growth.

The services offered by the new creative unit include specialist brand creation teams, communications planners and a full creative team including studio and digital specialists; this team all come from globally leading and awarded creative agency backgrounds working on some of the most successful global brands. This will sit alongside representation and PR teams on the ground, all of which will be fully supported by the HQ team in London.

The Hills Balfour MENA office is the central HQ for the group’s core integrated communications services (strategic planning and creative implementation). The team is led by Ant Dalton (former MD of BWM Dubai and a communications agency specialist) and Jason Dawes (also a partner of BWM Dubai, a founding partner of Naked Communications Europe and former Global Head of Media for Adidas). The core team of 10 people are highly respected in the region having been delivering high profile effective work for many of the leading brands there for the last 10yrs+. Hills Balfour is perfectly positioned with knowledge and networks in this region, where the local population take 30M outbound trips and spend twice that of any other traveller.

The addition of the Dubai office means Hills Balfour can assist any global network of agencies representing global destinations, to penetrate the most lucrative outbound market in the world.

For Hills Balfour it means they now provide an integrated service of specialities in one office that very few can match. In a world where brands and businesses in the travel, hospitality and sports sectors need to develop an ever more engaging relationship with the consumer, they now have even more diverse specialists in-house who can build those relationships in a meaningful way, working as one team or clients. The new office has launched with immediate successes – with the global brand campaign for Jumeirah Hotels and Resorts and digital work for Qatar Airways as part of a new range of projects.