Ahmed Al-Khatib

• Own consumer marketing across three markets, shaping brand positioning, channel strategy, and creative direction for the distinct culture and behaviour of each, with dedicated Saudi-market strategy and Gulf-dialect Arabic development.
• Led a flagship product launch into Saudi Arabia end to end: brand positioning, competitive benchmarking, price architecture, bilingual creative, and conversion-focused landing pages in Arabic and English.
• Authored and presented the regional marketing blueprint to senior management, covering brand purpose, a nine-platform channel ecosystem across social, marketplace, and owned media, and a 90-day execution roadmap.
• Direct creative, content, and localisation partners across markets and languages, maintaining a coherent brand while adapting to each audience.

I put together a case for the CEO, got appointed to fix it, and took on both the Marketing and
Communications functions with a team of 13. That restructure is what unlocked most of the growth that
followed.
• Student enrolment across the three UAE locations grew 31% in the period since I joined, reaching 300 to
400 active students, through a mix of paid campaign work, sharper retention communications, and
community-building that kept families coming back season after season.
• Brand exposure tripled. Social media went from quiet to one of the most active awareness channels the
company had, and it stayed that way because the content strategy was built around what the audience
actually responded to, not what looked good on a brief.
• The marketing department became responsible for 4x the revenue it was generating before I joined, and
during peak seasons like summer and winter camps, it accounted for 66% of all company sign-ups and
income.
• Rebuilt the paid media approach using a custom audience segmentation model that pushed ROAS from
65% to 428% year on year. In high season, every AED 100K invested in campaigns returned over AED
400K in confirmed enrolments.
• Raised campaign response rates from 73% to 91% by rethinking how audiences were targeted and how
communications were sequenced, using live A/B testing data across Meta and Google.
• Negotiated and secured partnerships with UAE government entities, opening market advantages and
expansion pathways that a commercial marketing budget alone could not have bought. Those relationships
took time to build and continue to benefit the company.
• Built a CRM and automation system from nothing, then layered AI agents on top of it that monitored live
communications, flagged missed touchpoints to the comms team, and ran emotional sentiment analysis on
customer interactions to sharpen how we messaged to different parent and student segments.
• Reduced content and campaign production from a full weeks work to a single day by putting ChatGPT,
Claude, Midjourney, and Meta Advantage+ into the teams actual workflow, not as experiments but as
standard operating tools.
• Personally directed on-ground video and cinematic production with external agencies during high seasons,
handling creative briefs, shoot logistics, and final sign-off to ensure everything met the brands quality bar.
• Ran 100+ influencer partnerships at zero paid cost, negotiating barter arrangements that consistently
generated awareness and pushed individual campaign performance up by around 10% per activation.
• Every new product line, camp, market entry, and programme launch the company ran went through the
marketing function I managed. That put me close to every major business decision the company made.

• Spent a year running cybersecurity audits and gap assessments across more than 12 client engagements,
working against ISO27001, UAE IA and NESA, SAMA, and CBK CSF frameworks. Every engagement
ended with a clearer compliance picture than the client started with.
• Wrote security policies and procedures for financial and government clients who needed them to be
practical, not just compliant. The difference between a policy that gets followed and one that sits in a drawer
is how its written.
• Designed and implemented a Role-Based Access Control system for a major financial sector client where
access had been too broad for too long. Tightened it without disrupting operations.
• Got involved in VAPT, digital forensics, and data recovery work that gave me a ground-level understanding
of how data systems actually fail. That perspective now shapes how I build and stress-test the marketing
and CRM systems I run.

I joined Burns the same year I started my Masters at ESIC, and worked there for the entire three years. Its an
independent creative digital agency in Madrid with clients across automotive, insurance, FMCG, and consumer
goods. Managing live accounts, sitting in client rooms, and working alongside creative and strategy teams on real
briefs with real deadlines is a different kind of education. I got three years of it.
• Worked on 8 to 10 campaigns a year for clients including Lexus, Colgate, and MAPFRE, covering digital,
social, and traditional channels. You learn quickly how brand work actually gets made when the client is in
the room and the deadline is tomorrow.
• Contributed to social media strategy and content planning using Hootsuite and Meta Ads Manager, pushing
engagement rate improvements of 18 to 25% on key campaigns. The gains came from tighter targeting and
better content timing, not bigger budgets. Same spend, better results.
• Tracked campaign budgets between 20K and 80K euros across multiple projects at once, coordinating
deliverables across creative, media, and strategy teams in Asana with a 95% on-time delivery rate across
three years.
• Did a lot of competitor and market analysis work that fed into campaign positioning. Some of it went into
client presentations word for word, which is when I realised the research was actually landing.
• Handled influencer coordination for selected campaigns, managed 5+ creator collaborations from first
contact through to post-campaign reporting, and presented to clients directly alongside senior account
managers during reviews.
By the third they gave me a lot more room to run campaigns independently. Thats what gave the to step into a full role after leaving.

Grew retail revenue 25% across GCC locations over six years, leading sales teams and managing high-value client relationships in a considered-purchase, showroom-led environment.