Three months ago, three of us sat around a table in Dubai and had the same conversation we'd been having for years.
Aliaa had just watched another AED 40,000-a-month agency retainer at Samsung deliver a campaign that a junior on her team could have executed in a week. Ahmed had just untangled a marketing tech stack at Majid Al Futtaim that four different agencies had spent two years bolting together — nobody understood the whole system, and nothing talked to anything else. Nariman had just watched a global creative brief travel from a HONOR senior in Shenzhen, through three agencies and five approvals, only to land on a Dubai billboard looking exactly like the version she'd drafted at HONOR in twenty minutes.
We were the senior operators. We were the ones the client hired to be in the room. But the work was being done by juniors, by freelancers, by contractors, by an offshore studio nobody had met. And the results reflected it.
So we started Pulse.
The senior-pitch, junior-execution problem
Here's the dynamic every mid-market MENA brand knows but nobody says out loud:
You hire an agency. The pitch team is impressive — a strategy director with 15 years of experience, a creative lead who worked on your favourite Emirati brand campaign, an account director who speaks fluent Arabic and understands the region. You sign.
Three months in, you realise the strategy director shows up to the monthly steer-co and nowhere else. The creative lead is on 8 other accounts. Your actual work is being done by a 24-year-old copywriter, a freelancer in Cairo, and a junior designer who joined last month.
The output isn't bad. It's just not what you paid for.
This is the industry's dirty secret. It's not a bug in the agency model — it's a feature. Agencies scale by leveraging senior talent across many accounts. That's how they make margins. Your senior operator is deliberately spread across 12 clients because the economics don't work otherwise.
That's fine for some brands. It's fatal for others.
What actually stops working
Junior execution stops working the moment your problem is non-standard.
- Standard campaign, standard budget, standard funnel? Juniors can execute perfectly.
- Multi-market attribution across 8 GCC countries with different currencies, different data laws, different consumer behaviour? Junior execution collapses.
- A CRM lifecycle that spans 3 legacy systems, 2 payment processors, and a loyalty program built in 2015? Junior execution collapses.
- A brand that has to feel authentically Emirati to Emiratis and authentically expat-friendly to the 88% expat population? Junior execution collapses.
- An AI marketing implementation that requires you to understand what a vector database is AND what a Ramadan campaign looks like in Kuwait? Junior execution collapses.
These problems need people who've actually done the work. Multiple times. In this region.
The Pulse model — deliberately small
Pulse is three senior operators. Aliaa (growth, CRM, performance marketing). Ahmed (marketing AI, technology, bespoke systems). Nariman (brand, creative, design).
We're capped at 8 active client engagements at any time. That's not a marketing pitch — that's math. Three of us, doing the work ourselves, means we cannot exceed that. If we tried, we'd have to hire juniors, and then we'd be the same as everyone else.
Our pricing reflects this: we charge more per hour than a big agency, but the total project cost is often lower because the work is done in fewer, senior hours instead of many junior hours. The person you brief is the person who ships.
"The person you brief is the person who ships." That's the whole promise.
You don't get a pitch team and a delivery team. You get us.
Why Dubai, why now
MENA is having its moment. Saudi Vision 2030 is reshaping the region. Dubai's economy is diversifying faster than any city on earth. Egypt has 105 million people and a growing middle class. Every global brand suddenly wants a real GCC strategy. Every Gulf brand suddenly wants to compete regionally, then globally.
But the marketing infrastructure is a decade behind. Most brands are running WordPress sites that fail Core Web Vitals. Most run analytics stacks assembled by three previous agencies. Most run "AI strategies" that are one Bloomreach dashboard and a lot of PowerPoint. Most have never seen what senior, coordinated, end-to-end work looks like — because senior operators in MENA have historically stayed in-house at MAF, L'Oréal, HONOR, Chalhoub, Emaar. They didn't start studios.
We think that's changing. We hope so.
What "end-to-end" actually means at Pulse
We do five things: AI marketing intelligence, websites, growth marketing, brand and design, and bespoke systems.
They're not siloed. That's the entire point.
Growth without websites and creative doesn't convert. Analytics without AI is just dashboards. Design without technology is unshippable. Custom software without brand thinking is CRM ware.
We built Pulse so that when you say "make my growth better," we don't hand you off to five vendors. We look at your brand, your site, your data, your funnel and your operations, and we tell you which of those actually needs work, then we do that work.
What comes next
Pulse is small by design. We won't be for everyone. We work best with mid-market to enterprise MENA brands (AED 15K+ per project, AED 25K+ monthly retainers) who are past the "we need an intern" phase and want senior thinking without the big-agency machinery.
Our first three retainer spots this quarter are open. If your problem sounds like the ones above, let's talk.
If not, we're always up for a conversation anyway — often the best outcome of a discovery call is when we tell you "we're not the right fit, but here's who is." That's the industry we want to be part of.
— Aliaa, Ahmed & Nariman