Lambert right here: Robust unique reporting from DeSmog. Once in a while, Saudi propaganda for Neom comes throughout my feed, and it’s clearly a grandiose actual property improvement signaling some kind of horrid finish state; the very very last thing the Saudi folks want is an indoor ski resort. However I didn’t understand how grandiose. Ka-ching ka-ching.
By Adam M. Lowenstein, a contract journalist and author masking the local weather disaster, capitalism, and company energy. A former Capitol Hill aide and U.S. Senate speechwriter, his work has additionally appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, The American Prospect, The Lever, and different publications. Initially revealed at DeSmog.
The video opens with the voice of a kid. “Because the starting, we’ve modified issues,” she says. “It’s in our genes. It’s what makes us human.”
The viewer zooms by way of levels in human improvement — agriculture, science, air journey, house flight. A dramatic musical rating rises steadily in quantity. “Now, we’ve got an opportunity to alter all the things,” the narrator intones, because the digital camera involves relaxation on a clean canvas.
After a beat, water explodes throughout the display screen, soaking the body. “Let’s change water,” she says, “so it flows ceaselessly. Power, so it powers our lives sustainably.”
From local weather change and meals safety to getting older and mobility, the video proceeds subject by subject, issuing an inspiring name to motion — one seen greater than 22 million occasions on YouTube, and by numerous others on large screens in New York Metropolis’s Occasions Sq..
“That is the place we are able to change all of it,” the narrator intones. “Neom,” she concludes, is “made to alter.”
“Neom” is the brainchild and flagship development mission of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler-in-waiting and de facto chief of Saudi Arabia. Designed hand-in-hand with elite Western consulting companies McKinsey & Firm, Oliver Wyman, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and named for a mix of “neo” and “mustaqbal” — the Greek and Arabic phrases for “new” and “future” — Neom is portrayed as a futuristic, emissions-free utopia within the nation’s northwest Tabuk province, which sits alongside the coast of the Crimson Sea. The mega-development is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed and owned by the Public Funding Fund (PIF), Saudi Arabia’s $900 billion sovereign wealth fund, which the crown prince additionally chairs.
Because the “made to alter” video suggests, Neom’s promotional efforts typically encompass fanciful digital renderings of luxurious resorts and futuristic cityscapes replete with lush greenery, vibrant pure wonders, and guarantees of ecological and environmental preservation. “Sustainability is a really huge theme in all the things that we do,” Rayan Fayez, Neom’s deputy CEO, instructed an viewers in Rio de Janeiro in June.
Fayez was addressing an occasion organized by the Future Funding Initiative (FII) Institute, a PIF-led nonprofit that convenes traders and world energy gamers in cities around the globe. A few of America’s wealthiest traders and chief executives might be talking at this yr’s flagship FII gathering often called “Davos within the Desert” — which can happen within the Saudi capital of Riyadh from October 29-31 — together with Eric Schmidt, the previous CEO of Google; Stephen Schwarzman, the pinnacle of the non-public fairness big Blackstone; and Larry Fink, CEO of the asset supervisor BlackRock. The FII Institute counts Neom as a “strategic companion.”
Paradoxically for a mission cloaked in inexperienced branding, Neom — or at the very least the concept of Neom — has emerged as an necessary asset within the Saudi authorities’s marketing campaign to protect world demand for fossil fuels.
“Mohammed bin Salman desires to be a part of this … world concern with the local weather,” stated Madawi Al-Rasheed, a visiting professor on the London College of Economics (LSE) Center East Centre. “But additionally, let’s not overlook that the [Saudi] economic system is predicated on oil, and this is among the most polluting industries possible. … The entire nation’s primarily based on an oil firm. They’ve to point out that they’re diversifying, investing in different issues.”
This dilemma has made Neom a core plank in Crown Prince Mohammed’s plan for the way forward for Saudi Arabia. Often known as “Imaginative and prescient 2030,” the McKinsey–conceived roadmap ostensibly charts a course for the nation to open itself to the world — primarily by way of tourism and international funding — whereas lowering its dependence on oil. Key to this transformation is an aggressive rebrand of the dominion as a frontrunner within the world battle towards local weather change.
It’s a delicate problem to painting the world’s largest oil exporter — and a documented opponent of world local weather motion, notably at UN local weather talks — as a champion of sustainability. However it’s not a problem that the Saudi authorities is making an attempt alone. DeSmog discovered that at the very least two-dozen communications companies talked about on this story — together with companies specializing in PR, consulting, promoting, and video and graphic design — have collectively earned tens of tens of millions of {dollars} serving to Crown Prince Mohammed and the Saudi authorities develop and promote the thought of Neom.
To construct up an image of those firms’ actions, DeSmog reviewed tons of of inside firm paperwork; trade award submissions and press releases; social media posts and case research revealed by employees and executives at Neom and most of the particular person companies; in addition to 1000’s of pages of paperwork filed with the U.S. Division of Justice (DOJ). (The Overseas Brokers Registration Act requires American firms who advocate or foyer for international governments to reveal details about these actions, in addition to the names of the staff concerned in them, to the DOJ.)
If Neom’s advertising and marketing supplies are to be believed, the town will quickly provide a globally built-in, carbon-free house for billions of {dollars}’ value of investor capital and tens of millions of individuals from around the globe, due to engineering and concrete improvement marvels like The Line, a 170-kilometer-long, 500-meter-tall metropolis “powered by 100% clear power,” and Trojena, a mountainous area that guarantees to deploy cloud seeding to create an out of doors ski resort within the desert.
The Line offers “a blueprint for a way folks and planet can co-exist in concord,” says a Neom press launch distributed by Chicago-headquartered Edelman, one of many largest PR companies on the earth. Trojena, which is scheduled to host the Asian Winter Video games in 2029, “confirms our dedication to be a part of the worldwide effort to guard the atmosphere,” Crown Prince Mohammed says in one other launch, this one distributed by the New York Metropolis-based communications agency Teneo. Actually, all of Neom’s areas and initiatives “might be aligned of their respect for the atmosphere and reaching steadiness, as a result of Neom’s bold imaginative and prescient seeks to form the long run through which dwelling and dealing are built-in in a sustainable manner,” Teneo’s launch says.
Specialists instructed DeSmog that whether or not or not Neom is ever constructed, the reward for the Saudi authorities of involving so many prestigious companies goes past branding the nation as inexperienced and legitimizing the crown prince’s maintain on energy. The size of Western entanglement creates a monetary dependence on Saudi largesse that makes it tougher for these companies to disengage from Saudi Arabia — or for enterprise leaders and authorities officers to talk out publicly — due to the Saudi state’s human rights abuses, its repression of civil and political liberties, or its efforts to impede world local weather negotiations.
Following the October 2018 abduction and dismemberment of Washington Publish journalist Jamal Khashoggi — an operation that Crown Prince Mohammed “accepted,” based on a U.S. intelligence evaluation — Western elites’ shunning of the dominion finally proved as fleeting as their governments’ guarantees to isolate the crown prince. However the outcry, whereas short-lived, nonetheless served as a wake-up name for the crown prince and his allies, specialists stated, notably as the federal government has confronted criticism over allegations of forcibly evicting residents of the Tabuk province to create space for Neom.
“What they need is to create a considerable Western curiosity and personnel in Saudi Arabia as a way to make Saudi Arabia defended by Western pursuits, ought to Saudi Arabia want that,” stated LSE’s Madawi Al-Rasheed. “You probably have an enormous inhabitants of Westerners in a rustic … then it turns into like a satellite tv for pc state that must be protected as a result of Western pursuits are actually intertwined with the native economic system, and you’ll’t simply abandon your folks.”
The crown prince is “fascinated about other ways of conserving Western pursuits alive in Saudi Arabia,” Al-Rasheed stated. “These initiatives, these consultancy companies, the PR firms are all meant to create that bondage — an alternative choice to only one commodity, and that’s oil.”
I. A ‘Golden Money Cow’: Elite Companies Capitalize on Neom
Based on the paperwork reviewed by DeSmog, the record of companies which have signed contracts with Neom contains a few of the world’s greatest advertising and marketing, promoting, and communications conglomerates and their subsidiaries, equivalent to:
- Omnicom Group, together with subsidiaries TBWARaad and adam&eveDDB;
- Publicis Groupe, together with subsidiaries Starcom Worldwide, Leo Burnett, Publicis Media, and Saatchi & Saatchi;
- WPP, together with subsidiaries ASDA’A BCW and Landor, in addition to BCW and Hill & Knowlton (now Burson);
- Interpublic Group (IPG), together with subsidiaries McCann Enterprise, McCann New York, and Craft Worldwide (all a part of the McCann Worldgroup community);
- S4Capital, together with subsidiary Monks (previously Media.Monks); and,
- Avenir World, together with subsidiary Hanover Communications.
Unbiased companies, equivalent to Edelman, Teneo, KARV (previously KARV Communications), Ruder Finn, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck have collectively gained tens of millions of {dollars}’ value of further work for Neom, as have numerous smaller inventive companies, many headquartered in New York Metropolis and London.
This record of firms working to form Neom’s picture, which isn’t complete, omits most of the lobbying and public affairs companies that work to form the Saudis’ repute in Washington, DC and different capitals. It additionally omits the 23 structure studios shaping the town’s precise development, based on a tally compiled by the structure publication Dezeen.
Different U.S.-based firms, together with FleishmanHillard and Prosek Companions, have been employed by the FII Institute, which continuously promotes Neom at its occasions. Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the pinnacle of the PIF and the chairman of the board of Saudi Aramco, the nation’s state-run oil big, additionally serves as chairman of the FII Institute. (There isn’t a indication that FleishmanHillard, which is a part of Omnicom, or Prosek Companions have labored for Neom straight.)
The FII Institute is run by Richard Attias, a former Publicis Groupe govt and longtime producer of the World Financial Discussion board (WEF), an annual gathering for world elites in Davos, Switzerland. Lately Attias, who has shut ties to the Saudi royal household, and his communications agency, Richard Attias & Associates, are largely identified for internet hosting the FII’s “Davos within the Desert” in Riyadh. (The crown prince publicly launched Neom on the gathering in 2017.)
Past the FII, nevertheless, Attias and his firm have additionally carried out important work for Neom, together with organizing “Uncover Neom” excursions to solicit international funding in cities starting from Boston and Miami to Berlin, Paris, and Seoul, based on information reviews and social media posts. The PR company KARV’s work for Neom, which stays ongoing, can be run by way of Attias’s firm.
A spokesperson for the workplace of Richard Attias instructed DeSmog in an e mail that Richard Attias & Associates “is a world strategic communications and occasions agency that works with greater than 50 shoppers worldwide yearly, together with Neom. We’ve got offered occasions companies for the Uncover Neom Roadshows from 2022 to 2023, and communications advisory since 2023.” The FII Institute, the spokesperson stated, “counts greater than 30 worldwide and regional entities as strategic companions, and Neom is certainly one in all them.”
DeSmog’s findings recommend that many PR and consulting firms have anchored themselves within the profitable ecosystem of Neom and the Saudi authorities, partly by capitalizing on Crown Prince Mohammed’s want to be perceived as taking motion on local weather change.
Sarah Leah Whitson, govt director of the nonprofit DAWN (Democracy for the Arab World Now), a Washington, DC-based nonprofit that was co-founded by Jamal Khashoggi, stated the Saudi authorities is keen to spend huge quantities of cash for purported Western experience with little oversight. Put merely, Neom contracts are a “golden money cow,” Whitson stated. (One Neom-focused job opening in London, which was posted by a Publicis subsidiary, appealed to potential candidates by describing Neom as a shopper providing “limitless content material budgets.”)
In conversations with DeSmog, a former worker of a sustainability-focused subsidiary of one of many world’s greatest communications conglomerates described witnessing an aggressive, even determined, push to win a contract with Neom.
The pitch, which ultimately concerned a few of the conglomerate’s most senior executives, was for work to advertise one in all Neom’s broadly touted environmental initiatives. The promoting company’s historical past of working with shoppers looking for to advance their local weather and environmental targets fashioned a key a part of its enchantment.
The previous worker, who requested to share their story anonymously for concern {of professional} repercussions, expressed considerations to executives throughout the company that Neom might be largely a greenwashing train for a authorities funded by, and dedicated to, oil extraction. The previous worker additionally cautioned that the agency, by doing this work for Neom, may contribute to sanitizing the Saudi authorities’s human rights report.
When this worker shared their considerations internally, they had been instructed that the company’s participation within the pitch was very important as a result of the company had such a robust repute for sustainability. After escalating considerations to extra senior executives all through the corporate, the previous worker got here to imagine that that they had been silenced and excluded from the mission.
Finally, the worker selected to depart the corporate after concluding that their place was not tenable — and that their considerations about sustainability and human rights, regardless of that includes prominently within the firm’s code of conduct, would proceed to be ignored.
As this worker’s expertise suggests, for the Western creatives and communicators cashing in on Neom contracts, whether or not Neom’s flagship initiatives are really inexperienced — or whether or not they’re even ever more likely to exist — seems to be of secondary significance to the duty of portraying them that manner. For these firms, “why not get in on the motion? It’s simple cash, with extra to return,” stated DAWN’s Sarah Leah Whitson.
II. ‘A Clean Canvas’: Crafting a Handy Narrative
In response to a sequence of detailed questions, in addition to requests for an interview and feedback for this story, a spokesperson for Neom emailed a press release to DeSmog: “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is dedicated to web zero carbon emissions by 2060. Neom is supporting that objective by investing in rising inexperienced applied sciences, together with hydrogen manufacturing at scale, such because the world’s largest hydrogen plant … We’re additionally dedicated to creating our developments web zero emission zones upon completion, as we proceed to deal with leveraging 100% renewable power sources with solar and wind being plentiful on this area of Saudi Arabia. Within the development part of our developments, we’re targeted on decarbonizing, with the combination of round economic system ideas together with using carbon seize and utilization know-how in our cement manufacturing vegetation.
“Sustainability is deeply woven into Neom’s ethos, values, enterprise practices, and operations. One in all our core commitments is to protect 95 p.c of Neom for nature. We’re additionally regreening and rewilding native landscapes as a part of our Neom Nature Reserve. 5 native species have already been reintroduced to 2 native habitat zones, and greater than three million bushes, shrubs, and grasses have been planted throughout 750 hectares as a part of our program to revive intensive pure habitats with 100 million native vegetation.”
Along with Neom, as a part of this investigation DeSmog contacted the companies talked about within the story to request interviews and feedback about their work for Neom. DeSmog additionally submitted a remark request to the Saudi embassy in Washington, DC. Most companies both declined to remark or didn’t reply. The embassy additionally didn’t reply.
With a purpose to work for the Saudi authorities, many firms comply with aggressive confidentiality and nondisclosure phrases. Earlier this yr, as an example, McKinsey, Teneo, M. Klein & Firm, and BCG defied a subpoena from the U.S. Senate Everlasting Subcommittee on Investigations, which was inspecting the Saudi authorities’s efforts to affect U.S. coverage by way of techniques equivalent to “sportswashing,” telling senators that Saudi officers wouldn’t enable them to debate their work.
“It’s merely staggering to me that American firms are usually not solely keen to simply accept this declare, permitting the Saudi authorities to find out what’s permitted to offer this subcommittee, but in addition that they’d use it to justify their refusal to adjust to a duly-issued congressional subpoena,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, the chairman of the subcommittee, stated in a ready assertion for a February listening to with executives of the 4 companies.
Regardless of these strident nondisclosure phrases, nevertheless, some firms have been extra vocal about their work for Neom on their web sites and on social media.
“From introducing a brand new mannequin for city sustainability powered by 100% renewable power to creating hyper-connected communities centered round nature, not roads — [Neom’s] ‘dwelling laboratories’ will embrace know-how and innovation at scale to reinforce liveability and reply a few of humanity’s most pressing challenges,” McCann Enterprise wrote in a case research about its function in Neom’s “made to alter” video. “Designed to encourage, it gives a tantalizing glimpse of what the long run may appear to be.”
McCann Enterprise is a part of the worldwide community McCann Worldgroup, which itself is the creator of a 168-slide presentation titled “THE STORY OF NEOM.” This inside doc, which was obtained by DeSmog, options detailed overviews of Neom’s areas and offers promotional language and graphics which have appeared repeatedly throughout Neom’s web site, social media exercise, movies, and different supplies. The phrases “sustainable” and “sustainability” collectively seem 58 occasions all through the doc. McCann Worldgroup declined to remark.
“Sustainability is on the coronary heart of all the things we do,” the presentation states — a message McCann Enterprise has carried forth in a lot of its work for Neom. Within the case research concerning the “made to alter” video (a part of what the company known as a “spectacular” marketing campaign), McCann Enterprise described Neom as “a spot designed to pay attention and speed up the human drive for progress.” Town, the corporate stated, is “a clean canvas for a brand new period of sustainable dwelling.”
“The inventive concept from McCann London positions Neom as a change-maker that can encourage the world because it reimagines a more healthy, extra accountable, environment friendly, sustainable, and balanced lifestyle, ranging from a clean canvas,” echoes a LinkedIn submit by Pleasure Movies, a manufacturing firm that labored on the “made to alter” video and has been concerned in selling quite a few Neom initiatives.
The “clean canvas” narrative is one which the Saudi authorities has promoted eagerly. “Since we’ve got [an] empty place, and we wish to have a spot for 10 million folks, then let’s assume from scratch,” Crown Prince Mohammed stated in a 2023 documentary about The Line on Discovery UK.
However the Tabuk province in northwest Saudi Arabia, the place items of Neom are slowly being constructed, was neither clean nor empty earlier than it was claimed for the town’s development. The land’s longtime residents embrace members of the Huwaitat tribe, who the Saudi authorities started forcibly evicting originally of 2020, based on a report from the worldwide nonprofit ALQST for Human Rights. The tribal neighborhood, whose members had lived for hundreds of years in what Western inventive companies repeatedly painting as empty, “was terrorized into submission,” DAWN’s Sarah Leah Whitson instructed DeSmog. “[We] haven’t heard a peep from them since.”
ALQST has documented that at the very least 15 Huwaitat individuals who opposed being displaced for Neom’s “clean canvas” have been sentenced “to jail phrases of between 15 and 50 years.” One other 5 have been sentenced to dying. In 2020 Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, a distinguished Huwaitat protestor, was killed by Saudi particular forces in his house. Earlier this yr a former Saudi intelligence official instructed the BBC that the federal government had “licensed using deadly power towards whoever stayed of their house.”
The pressured eviction of the Huwaitat tribe and the dying of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti haven’t captured world consideration in the identical manner because the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. However these developments have however been broadly reported within the media and publicized by human rights advocates. In Might 2023, a gaggle of unbiased specialists appointed by the UN warned that three members of the Huwaitat tribe had been going through “imminent execution” for opposing their eviction for The Line. “We urge all firms concerned, together with international traders, to make sure that they don’t seem to be inflicting or contributing to, and are usually not straight linked to, severe human rights abuses,” the UN specialists wrote.
A handful of firms have confirmed keen to stroll away from Saudi contracts. In July 2018, Gladstone Place Companions, an unbiased New York Metropolis-based communications agency, signed a virtually $200,000 settlement to advertise Neom in U.S. markets and introduce the town’s CEO to Fortune journal and different “top-tier media.” Gladstone terminated the contract shortly after Khashoggi’s disappearance. Extra just lately, Malcolm Aw, the CEO of the renewable power agency Photo voltaic Water, instructed Enterprise Insider that he scrapped a $100 million contract with Neom to construct solar-powered water desalination vegetation within the metropolis after studying of the federal government’s aggressive eviction of the Huwaitat folks.
However moderately than strolling away, most Western firms doing enterprise with Neom seem to have chosen the extra profitable path of trying the opposite manner, a sample that seems more likely to proceed. “Spreading such massive quantities of capital … by way of such a broad spectrum of elite American firms precludes that type of blowback from taking place once more,” stated DAWN’s Sarah Leah Whitson, referring to the worldwide backlash that adopted Khashoggi’s homicide in 2018.
Actually, the Saudi authorities’s express dedication to extracting fossil fuels and obstructing world local weather diplomacy, in addition to its human rights abuses, ongoing political repression, and intolerance of dissent — equivalent to decades-long jail phrases for social media posts important of Neom or the authorities itself — appear solely to have created extra demand for elite repute cleaning.
One PR trade award framed that problem as a possibility: “The worldwide sentiment round Neom … was one rooted in cynicism and confusion moderately than pleasure.”
III. ‘What’s Neom?’: A Sprawling Internet of Contracts
In 2023, the yr after it painted Neom as “made to alter,” McCann Enterprise returned for one more piece of labor, this time to current Google searchers, YouTube streamers, and social media scrollers with the query of “what’s Neom?” — after which align their solutions with a Neom-approved narrative.
Because it had through the “made to alter” marketing campaign, the London company teamed up with Monks, a “digital working model” of S4Capital, an promoting and advertising and marketing firm based by Sir Martin Sorrell, the founder and former head of the worldwide conglomerate WPP. (Neom is “one of the visionary, bold, thrilling, and motivating initiatives I’ve ever seen,” Sir Martin wrote of “made to alter.”) Monks referred DeSmog to its assertion on fashionable slavery and its code of conduct.
Extra contributors to the brand new marketing campaign included Google; Mathematic, a Paris-headquartered design studio that had additionally labored on movies for Trojena; Whisper, a UK-based manufacturing firm; and Starcom, Leo Burnett, and Saatchi & Saatchi – all subsidiaries of the French holding group Publicis. Whisper and McCann Enterprise had beforehand collaborated on movies for Tonomus, Neom’s so-called “hyperconnected cognitive metropolis,” which each Edelman and the DC lobbying store Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck have additionally helped promote.
“What’s Neom?” featured a very shut partnership between Neom and Google Inventive Works, an operation throughout the tech big that helps firms monetize Google customers’ information and a spotlight. Based on a February 2024 case research written by a former Neom advertising and marketing govt and revealed by Google, “what’s Neom?” sought to make use of detailed monitoring and focusing on of searching conduct by Google search and YouTube customers to alter how viewers thought of Neom.
The marketing campaign’s entry level was a sequence of “15-second teaser video advertisements” on YouTube and different platforms. If viewers engaged with the teaser movies, they had been then “robotically proven” an extended video that “used easy, conversational language to demystify the complexity of the Neom mission, which was important to the marketing campaign’s storytelling component,” the case research stated. Lots of the movies emphasised Neom’s environmental claims. Neom is “a completely new mannequin for sustainable dwelling,” acknowledged one video. “Name it what you need, but it surely’s a spot that’s going to alter the way in which we dwell on this planet,” stated one other.
Creating the marketing campaign concerned “an extremely quick turnaround shoot that spanned the globe,” stated one Whisper worker in an interview revealed on LinkedIn. “An actual feat of spectacular logistics delivered by the workforce!” For McCann Enterprise’s half, the “what’s Neom?” movies concerned a workforce of at the very least 14 workers, based on a celebratory LinkedIn submit by the corporate’s chief inventive officer.
“Exaggerated and unfavourable commentary overwhelms the media and on-line panorama, drowning out credible details about many matters together with Neom,” McCann Enterprise wrote in a separate case research. “We would have liked to convey the reality to the entrance web page. And at present’s entrance web page is the Google outcomes web page.”
In accordance to McCann Enterprise, for the 2023 mission it employed Ipsos, a survey agency, partly to trace Neom’s “model well being.” In Might, a couple of months after “what’s Neom?” launched, some journalists opened their inboxes to search out that they had been being requested to fill out an “Ipsos Survey for Neom.” The request got here from KARV, the unbiased PR company primarily based in New York Metropolis. (It’s unclear whether or not the Ipsos survey distributed by KARV is identical one referenced within the McCann Enterprise case research.) Earlier that yr, KARV had signed a $980,000 contract to offer “Neom management” with “strategic communications and media relations,” together with “strategic positioning counsel” and “messaging and editorial help,” through Richard Attias & Associates.
This wasn’t KARV’s first time doing enterprise with the Saudi authorities. In February 2019, barely 4 months after Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance, KARV head Andrew Frank personally signed a contract with the PIF. Crown Prince Mohammed’s place as chair of the funding fund means it’s successfully managed by him.
The PIF “is simply MBS [Mohammed bin Salman] himself,” Abdullah Alaoudh, the senior director for countering authoritarianism on the DC-based Center East Democracy Heart, instructed DeSmog. “I don’t know why they name it [a] sovereign wealth fund. It’s simply MBS’s wealth fund, mainly.” (KARV’s work for the PIF would ultimately convey in additional than $3 million.)
In a press release emailed to DeSmog, a KARV spokesperson stated, “KARV works together with Richard Attias & Associates in offering strategic communications, messaging, and media relations help to Neom because it goals to handle the world’s best challenges by way of developments in healthcare, training, financial alternative, and sustainability.”
Among the many quite a few initiatives that “what’s Neom?” sought to introduce to the world was Trojena, Neom’s ski resort and one in all its most closely promoted endeavors. Actually, one other arm of McCann Worldgroup had already been concerned in Trojena: In early 2022, across the similar time that McCann Enterprise was portraying Neom as “made to alter,” the U.S.-based McCann New York had been gearing up to assist launch the mountain resort.
Trojena, based on the “STORY OF NEOM” inside branding doc created by McCann Worldgroup and obtained by DeSmog, will home “The Vault,” a “folding village” and “vertical metropolis within a mountain with its personal microclimate,” in addition to “the primary out of doors ski resort in Saudi Arabia” with “30 km of deliberate ski slopes.”
To convey this implausible-sounding idea to life, McCann New York labored with Pleasure Movies — which was additionally concerned within the “made to alter” and “what’s Neom?” campaigns — to create a video portraying a gaggle of skiers and snowboarders racing uphill within the snow, by way of an avalanche, earlier than taking pictures into the sky beneath the slogan, “journey to new heights.” The video has racked up greater than 17 million views on YouTube, although specialists cautioned that these numbers are to be interpreted with some skepticism, given the Saudi authorities’s report of utilizing bots and troll farms to enhance social media numbers and harass critics.
Neom additionally took the businesses’ work past social media. With the assistance of Pixel Artworks, a UK-based “immersive expertise” firm, Neom splashed the companies’ Trojena imagery throughout enormous transferring billboards in Riyadh, Occasions Sq., and London’s Piccadilly Circus.
This marketing campaign put Neom’s dedication to sustainability entrance and middle. Generally the message was implicit: Winter sports activities, by definition, require water and chilly temperatures. Different occasions, the companies had been extra direct. “Trojena will redefine mountain tourism for the world by creating a spot primarily based on the ideas of ecotourism, highlighting our efforts to protect nature and improve the neighborhood’s high quality of life,” learn one unattributed quote included in a case research revealed by Squint/Opera, a UK-based inventive store owned by the U.S. company Journey.
The identical quote was additionally attributed to Crown Prince Mohammed in a press launch — distributed by Teneo — that accompanied Trojena’s launch. The discharge additionally quoted Nadhmi Al-Nasr, Neom’s CEO, describing Trojena as “a serious contribution to reaching Neom’s long-term ambitions by adhering to the ideas of sustainability.”
Pixel Artworks, Pleasure Movies, and Squint/Opera have every gained different contracts with Neom. All three, as an example, have promoted The Line; Pixel Artworks says its video concerning the hypothetical horizontal metropolis has generated greater than 157 million YouTube views. And plenty of proceed to generate income from Neom. In March, Pleasure Movies posted a video on Instagram about its ongoing work for Elanan, Neom’s “distinctive wellness retreat embedded in nature.” (KARV and Teneo have additionally promoted Elanan.)
Whether or not initiatives like Elanan, Trojena, and The Line really come to life or stay within the digital realm of slide decks and social media guarantees, the picture of Neom — and the sprawling, interconnected internet of contracts that helps create that picture — serves an necessary perform for the Saudi authorities.
“I believe what occurred with Neom is that there’s a lot cash at stake that … what it managed to do is to purchase folks’s silence, together with firms and states,” Lina Alhathloul, the pinnacle of monitoring and advocacy for ALQST, instructed DeSmog. Alhathloul’s sister, Loujain, an activist for girls’s rights in Saudi Arabia, was jailed by the federal government for greater than three years and continues to be banned from leaving the nation.
“Everybody [is] accepting Saudi cash in trade for silence,” Lina Alhathloul stated.
IV. ‘Hydrocarbons…for Many, Many A long time to Come’: A Kingdom Dedicated to Oil
In January 2024, Neom invited traders, politicians, company executives, and different attendees of the World Financial Discussion board in Davos to drop by “Neom Home,” a pop-up house branded with Neom’s brand and emblazoned with environmental imagery. Among the constructing’s partitions gave the impression to be coated in greenery. An almost floor-to-ceiling graphic described Neom as “redefining the round economic system” and “powered by 100% clear power.” Interactive screens confirmed guests how Neom would “redefine livability, enterprise, and conservation,” Neom later stated.
All through the week, Neom Home, which was designed partly by the identical Pixel Artworks that had carried out work for Trojena and The Line, hosted a sequence of conversations concerning the metropolis’s progress and potential. Many of those occasions appeared designed to create the picture of a authorities main the battle for world local weather motion. (Amongst these touting the promise of Neom to traders was Eric Cantor, the previous majority chief of the U.S. Home of Representatives.)
Regardless of the inexperienced imagery and messaging surrounding the occasions, some officers who spoke at Neom Home supplied a unique tackle the federal government’s local weather agenda. Throughout a dialogue about “mitigation by way of proactive motion,” Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for international affairs — and, since 2022, the nation’s local weather envoy — instructed the viewers, “We wish to be a practical companion, and we wish the world to be reasonable,” using a widespread rhetorical tactic of Saudi officers to caricature requires the phase-out of fossil fuels as naïve or a “fantasy.” “We’re saying that hydrocarbons would be the most important supply of power for the world for a lot of, many a long time to return,” Al-Jubeir stated.
Saudi Arabia is the largest exporter of oil on the earth. Almost two-thirds of presidency revenues stem from oil. Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil big valued at round $2 trillion, is among the world’s most useful and most worthwhile firms. The dominion controls round 82 p.c of Aramco; the PIF, which owns Neom, additionally owns round 16 p.c of Aramco — a stake value round $160 billion. (McCann Worldgroup, Hill & Knowlton, Publicis, BCW, IPG, Mathematic, and FleishmanHillard are among the many Western promoting and PR companies named on this story which have additionally labored for Aramco. The oil big has additionally spent tens of millions of {dollars} on sponsored content material offers with the in-house inventive studios of Western media retailers, together with the New York Occasions, Monetary Occasions and Reuters, lately, based on earlier reporting by DeSmog and Drilled).
“We’re attempting to redefine how companies coexist with nature,” Rayan Fayez, Neom’s deputy CEO, instructed Richard Attias at a 2023 FII Institute occasion. “Every part that we’re doing at present at Neom has nature and atmosphere on the core.”
But the town’s development is funded by oil gross sales, and the federal government’s whole working mannequin — together with its investments in Neom and the crown prince’s different “giga-projects,” equivalent to Diriyah, a $63 billion tourism improvement that can supposedly boast 38 lodges, and Jeddah Central, a waterfront mission for which the Saudi authorities has additionally confronted criticism for forcibly evicting native residents — relies upon on persevering with to promote as a lot oil as attainable, for so long as attainable.
“The crown prince [is] anxious about all this speak about local weather change and renewable power — all of that creates stress in his thoughts as a result of Saudi Arabia is dependent upon promoting oil,” LSE’s Madawi Al-Rasheed instructed DeSmog. “If oil turns into the ‘dangerous’ power, then he’s caught.” That’s why, at the same time as Saudi policymakers work to cut back the dominion’s personal reliance on fossil fuels — an goal Neom would possibly in truth help if its photo voltaic power, desalination, “inexperienced” hydrogen, and different renewable power initiatives come to fruition — the dominion continues to work diligently to impede efforts that would cut back world demand for oil.
In a 2008 paper, Cambridge College scholar Joanna Depledge summed up the Saudi authorities’s strategy to worldwide local weather negotiations as “striving for no.” Because of its negotiators’ savvy techniques, together with sowing disagreements amongst totally different nations, difficult established science about local weather change, selling false options to the disaster, and leveraging procedural guidelines and objections to stall discussions, “Saudi Arabia has been extraordinarily profitable in diverting the agenda and debates of the local weather change authorities away from these points it opposes, and in the direction of these it helps,” Depledge argued.
Greater than 15 years later, Depledge instructed DeSmog that what she wrote in that 2008 paper “practically all nonetheless applies.” The Saudi authorities “has a thirty-year report of obstruction and delay, defending its nationwide oil and fuel sector, and looking for to make sure UN local weather talks obtain as little as attainable, as slowly as attainable,” Depledge and two co-authors wrote in 2023. “From Saudi Arabia’s perspective, bold world local weather motion is … extra of a risk than local weather change itself.”
Final yr the nonprofit Centre for Local weather Reporting (CCR) revealed the existence of a Saudi authorities effort, often called the Oil Demand Sustainability Program, which “goals to spice up oil consumption throughout Asia and Africa, with the final word objective of defending Saudi oil revenues from efforts to part out fossil fuels,” CCR’s Lawrence Carter and Tom Costello wrote. Ultimately yr’s UN local weather summit, in the meantime, Saudi negotiators “flatly opposed any language in a deal that will even point out fossil fuels,” the New York Occasions reported. (Saudi Arabia is reportedly one in all a gaggle of oil-dependent nations already working to verify the upcoming UN summit in Azerbaijan doesn’t name for a world phaseout of fossil fuels, based on the Monetary Occasions.)
Whereas Saudi Arabia is way from the one nation dedicated to obstructing and delaying local weather motion, its efforts have confirmed notably profitable and, as Depledge and her co-authors famous, offered cowl for the US different nations that profit from continued fossil gas manufacturing however would moderately not be seen as spoilers.
Then there’s the environmental affect of Neom itself. Regardless of the rhetoric and imagery pushed by the town and its Western consultants, specialists and observers are skeptical that lots of Neom’s initiatives can match their inexperienced hype. The Line, as an example, “would require a really colossal amount of supplies, with emissions doubtless a lot larger than these produced in constructing a typical metropolis,” predicted Philip Oldfield, a professor of structure on the College of New South Wales in an opinion piece within the New York Occasions. In Might, the Wall Road Journal reported that Neom was constructing a number of fuel energy vegetation “to energy the area till greener power is sourced.”
“Trojena is a ski resort with faux snow. ‘Protect the atmosphere’ when it’s good to create new snow? It’s simply not credible,” ALQST’s Lina Alhathloul instructed DeSmog. “The Line really cuts the atmosphere and removes all [of] the character and the entire animals. It removes it utterly.”
Trojena and The Line are “the 2 most well-known initiatives in Neom,” Alhathloul stated, and “the 2 most important initiatives are clearly not inexperienced.”
V. ‘A Mannequin for Sustainable Residing’: Cashing in on the Concept of Neom
Whereas Western firms have been keen companions in portraying Trojena, The Line, and different Neom endeavors as inexperienced, many have confirmed equally adept at remodeling their work for Neom into contracts with different elements of the Saudi authorities.
In 2020, the unbiased company Ruder Finn agreed to a $1.7 million deal to advertise Neom’s company social accountability (CSR) packages, together with by creating movies that “inform the story of CSR and its affect on the beneficiaries and the area people.”
Within the contract, Ruder Finn described itself as “a women-owned enterprise with a robust dedication to range and inclusion.” Members of the LGBTQ neighborhood routinely face repression by the Saudi authorities. Lina Alhathloul’s sister, Loujain, stays one in all quite a few girls’s rights activists in detention. “Saudi Arabia’s personal report on girls’s rights is abysmal,” Amnesty Worldwide’s Sherine Tadros instructed the Guardian. (Ruder Finn declined to remark.)
Parts of Ruder Finn’s 2020 contract with Neom.
Just a few years after wrapping up its work for Neom, Ruder Finn notified the DOJ that the agency had signed a contract with the nation’s protection ministry to offer “strategic counsel, media relations, media monitoring, and content material technique and creation.” Kathy Bloomgarden, Ruder Finn’s CEO, personally registered with the DOJ to work on each contracts.
Edelman, one other unbiased agency that additionally started working for Neom in 2020, adopted an analogous path. Based on DOJ filings, the corporate’s first contract with Neom, signed in November 2020, was anticipated to generate $75,000 a month for 3 months — a small sum for a agency that will herald $840 million in income that yr. Since then, nevertheless, Edelman has signed at the very least a dozen further contracts and contract extensions with Neom and the Saudi authorities. Collectively these initiatives seem more likely to generate greater than $10.8 million for the agency, based on DeSmog’s evaluation.
As with Ruder Finn, Edelman’s work for Neom seems to have opened the door to work for different Saudi authorities companies — and concerned the agency’s most senior govt. In July 2022, Richard Edelman, Edelman’s CEO, hosted an invitation-only breakfast for Joseph Bradley, the pinnacle of Tonomus, one in all Neom’s flagship initiatives. Just a few months later Richard Edelman registered with the DOJ as a international agent representing the Saudi tradition ministry. The next yr Richard Edelman hosted one other “roundtable breakfast,” this time as a part of the agency’s work selling a “sustainable tourism” initiative for the Saudi tourism ministry.
In response to a request for remark, Edelman referred DeSmog to its human rights coverage and its public report on “citizenship.”
In Might 2023, Neom Inexperienced Hydrogen Firm — a three way partnership between Neom, Air Merchandise, and ACWA Energy, which itself is partly owned by the Saudi PIF — introduced an $8.4 billion funding valuation for a “inexperienced” hydrogen plant positioned in Oxagon, a floating industrial improvement “powered by renewable power.” (Edelman, Teneo, and Landor have additionally promoted Oxagon.) Hill & Knowlton, a U.S.-based agency, seems to have gained trade awards for its work for Neom Inexperienced Hydrogen Firm, together with a marketing campaign titled “Pioneering a inexperienced hydrogen future,” which gained an trade award for “Finest Marketing campaign Demonstrating Environmental Initiatives.” Hill & Knowlton is listed as a media contact in an Air Merchandise submitting with the U.S. authorities.
Earlier this yr Hill & Knowlton merged with BCW to type Burson, which itself is a part of London-headquarted WPP, one of many world’s largest communications conglomerates. Based on federal filings, ASDA’A BCW, a subsidiary of BCW, signed its first contract with the Saudi authorities in January 2017, earlier than linking up with Neom within the spring of 2020 for $390,000 value of work.
Burson will not be the one WPP subsidiary to work for Neom. Landor (previously Landor & Fitch) “labored by way of 24-hour shifts” to create Neom’s “model concept and narrative,” based on a case research written by the corporate. Landor has been supporting Neom “since 2017,” one govt stated final yr, and has “many extra Neom initiatives within the pipeline.”
VI. ‘You Need to Preserve That Picture’: Notion Is Actuality
The online of Western companies’ involvement with the Saudi authorities can seem infinite, doubtless with stronger and extra quite a few connections than will ever turn into public. Even so, one agency stands out for its success cashing in on the thought of Neom.
Based on federal filings with the DOJ, the technique consulting agency Teneo started its work for Neom in Might 2019, barely eight months after Jamal Khashoggi’s homicide. In an settlement value greater than $2 million, Teneo agreed to offer the town with messaging, communications, disaster response, and govt teaching. Each the contract and Teneo’s DOJ filings famous that Douglas Band, a former shut aide to former U.S. president Invoice Clinton after which president and co-founder of Teneo, could be personally concerned within the work. (Band left the corporate in 2020.)
Teneo’s early efforts had been evidently to the Saudi authorities’s liking. Teneo agreed to a different contract with Neom with an “efficient date” of November 1, 2019 — shortly after many media retailers and human rights teams had marked the one-year anniversary of Khashoggi’s assassination on the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, and solely weeks after Turkey’s authorities revealed transcripts of the journalist’s battle with the Saudi hit squad despatched to intercept him. (The assassins flew to and from Istanbul on planes owned by the PIF.) “You’ll suffocate me” had been Khashoggi’s closing phrases earlier than his dying.
In its federal filings concerning the $900,000 settlement, Teneo stated it could “handle the Neom Communications Division” and “present management of the division in addition to employees sources to make sure the international principal’s company messages and positioning are successfully communicated.” The corporate’s tasks included getting ready “a Disaster Preparedness functionality for Neom,” based on the contract. Teneo signed two further contracts with Neom in 2020, bringing in a further $1.2 million. In August 2021, Teneo’s work for the Saudi authorities expanded past Neom when the agency agreed to work for the PIF. The identical month Teneo signed one other $3.3 million contract with Neom.
Since 2022, Teneo has signed at the very least 9 further contracts and contract extensions with Neom, the PIF, and one other entity created partly by the PIF (and 80 p.c owned by it) that, in Teneo’s phrases, exists “to supply steerage and resourcing to help companies and trade within the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] area as they play their half within the world transition to web zero.” All collectively, Teneo’s work for the dominion seems to have been value greater than $30 million up to now.
“We’re additionally establishing a mannequin for sustainable dwelling around the globe,” stated Al-Nasr, the Neom CEO, in a press launch distributed by Teneo.
From Teneo to McCann to Google to Edelman, the net of prestigious and influential Western firms doing enterprise with Neom and the Saudi authorities is huge and deeply interconnected — and unimaginable to map in full. This opacity stems from a robust mixture of aggressive nondisclosure agreements, strident company obfuscation, and an amazing torrent of selling and PR imagery that blurs the boundary between what’s actual, and what exists solely in digital simulations and science fiction-style YouTube movies.
For each the Saudi authorities and its Western contractors, the excellence between the true and the imaginary seems irrelevant: The picture of Neom as a sustainable metropolis of the long run is finally what issues.
What’s inescapably actual, nevertheless, is the sum of money concerned, and the rising demand amongst autocratic oil-producers for assist revamping their reputations and promoting a inexperienced picture to home audiences and all through Western capitals. This profitable ecosystem extends nicely past the borders of Neom: In April, Teneo gained a $4.2 million contract with the authoritarian authorities of Azerbaijan to deal with communications for subsequent month’s COP29 UN local weather convention.
“The entire level of this sort of dictatorship is [to] make imagine that all the things is so rosy and nice,” stated LSE’s Madawi Al-Rasheed. “And when you’re focusing on companions such because the West — firms, world companies, banks — then you definately don’t need them to listen to concerning the dangerous aspect of the nation. You wish to keep that picture.”
Extra reporting by TJ Jordan
