Kayali Puts Founder Mona Kattan Front and Center in New DOOH Campaign in Dubai
In Dubai, where digital out-of-home increasingly functions as a luxury brand’s loudest stage, Kayali is leveraging scale, repetition, and familiarity to do what the company has always done and done well—and that’s to put its founder right in the spotlight.
Throughout various digital screens across the city – as well as the large-format installations dotted around Downtown Dubai – Kayali's current DOOH installation highlights the Freedom Collection with desert-inspired imagery complemented by the inimitable presence of Mona Kattan herself. The images are characterized by soft movement, glowing skin, and sunny color schemes that position the perfumes not as separate entities but as an extension of the personality that defines Kayali.
Unlike many beauty and cosmetics houses before them, where the founders are slowly phased from the visual work into entirely abstract brand identities or celebrity endorsement partnerships, Kayali continues to emphasize recognition. Kattan is not just a face of the brand in their marketing campaigns but a presence in the world the brand represents—smiling in the camera lens, brand products in hand, in the world of the brand. It has the essence of being a deliberate brand choice rather than just in transition stages.
The visual approach for this campaign sees the images swing between two different options. Kattan is sometimes the solitary focus on the screen with beautiful, sunset-colored backgrounds. Other shots involve the perfumes being centered with the scent bottles lined up below an illuminated arch. Not once are they completely separated from the warmth that Kattan elsewhere brings.
In the Freedom Collection by Kayali, what is being conveyed is not through explicit statements or very heavy advertising; the brand achieves its ends through visualization and familiarity. It is understood that what one has on offer is playfulness, feminity, and a carefree, tropical sensation. It’s also the story that the founder has been telling through her life.
Where in Dubai’s saturated digital out-of-home advertising space, high-end campaigns tend to blend together, Kayali’s is notable in its cheekiness. The company is not attempting a rebrand or a transference towards the abstract. It is reinforcing what it knows works—a muse and messenger in Mona Kattan, and a company that has never pretended to have existed independent of her.
The campaign landed on Dubai’s digital screens in the first week of December.
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