Initiative has appointed Darine Elkaissi as Managing Director for Saudi Arabia, putting a media executive with more than two decades of regional experience in charge of its business in the Gulf advertising market that agencies are competing hardest to win.
The agency, which operates across the MENAT region under Middle East Communications Network and sits within Omnicom, confirmed the appointment on 2 September 2026. Elkaissi will be based in Riyadh and will lead both strategy and operations for the Saudi business.
A growth brief tied to Vision 2030
The mandate set out for the role is unusually explicit about growth. Initiative said Elkaissi will steer its Saudi strategy and operations in step with Vision 2030, drive client growth and new business, advance integrated and data led media capabilities, and build out the strongest local talent bench the agency can assemble in the Kingdom.
That combination of commercial targets and capability building reflects where the Saudi market now sits. Media budgets in the Kingdom have been reshaped by the giga projects and by the sovereign backed entities that commission work at national scale, and agencies are being asked to supply data infrastructure and local staffing rather than campaign execution alone.
Two decades across agency, client and media owner
Elkaissi arrives with more than 20 years of experience spanning creative and media agencies, client side marketing and the media owner community, including senior leadership roles at WPP Media and VML. That mix matters in a market where agency leaders are routinely asked to sit on the other side of the table from procurement teams that have themselves been professionalised in recent years.
She has helped launch and scale several of the Kingdom prominent national projects and Public Investment Fund entities, built teams from the ground up, and developed long standing relationships with senior clients across government, telecommunications, fast moving consumer goods and financial services. Those four categories account for a substantial share of measured advertising spend in Saudi Arabia, which makes the client coverage directly relevant to the revenue brief.
Her work has been recognised at regional and international awards festivals, and she was named among the Global 200 Women Power Leaders in 2025.
Why the appointment reads as a market signal
Appointing a Managing Director dedicated to Saudi Arabia, rather than running the market from Dubai, is the structural point. For years the standard regional model placed decision making in the United Arab Emirates and treated the Kingdom as a serviced market. Client expectations have moved, and in many categories local presence is now a condition of being considered at all.
The talent element of the brief is the harder half. Agencies operating in the Kingdom are competing for a limited pool of experienced Saudi media professionals, and localisation requirements mean the competition is not solved by importing staff. An executive who has built teams in market is a more useful hire against that constraint than one who has only managed accounts.
Initiative has not disclosed who Elkaissi succeeds or the reporting line for the role beyond its MENAT structure.
