Lambert right here: Sturdy authentic reporting from DeSmog. From time to time, Saudi propaganda for Neom comes throughout my feed, and it’s clearly a grandiose actual property growth signaling some type of horrid finish state; the very final 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 overlaying 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. “For the reason that starting, we’ve modified issues,” she says. “It’s in our genes. It’s what makes us human.”
The viewer zooms by levels in human growth — agriculture, science, air journey, area flight. A dramatic musical rating rises steadily in quantity. “Now, we now have an opportunity to vary all the things,” the narrator intones, because the digicam involves relaxation on a clean canvas.
After a beat, water explodes throughout the display, 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 will change all of it,” the narrator intones. “Neom,” she concludes, is “made to vary.”
“Neom” is the brainchild and flagship building 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 corporations McKinsey & Firm, Oliver Wyman, and Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and named for a mixture 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 vary” 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 large 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 world wide. A few of America’s wealthiest traders and chief executives will probably be talking at this 12 months’s flagship FII gathering generally known as “Davos within the Desert” — which is able to 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 associate.”
Paradoxically for a mission cloaked in inexperienced branding, Neom — or not less than the concept of Neom — has emerged as an essential 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 Faculty of Economics (LSE) Center East Centre. “But additionally, let’s not neglect that the [Saudi] economic system is predicated on oil, and this is without doubt one of the most polluting industries imaginable. … The entire nation’s primarily based on an oil firm. They’ve to indicate 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 called “Imaginative and prescient 2030,” the McKinsey–conceived roadmap ostensibly charts a course for the nation to open itself to the world — primarily by tourism and overseas funding — whereas decreasing its dependence on oil. Key to this transformation is an aggressive rebrand of the dominion as a pacesetter within the world struggle in opposition to local weather change.
It’s a delicate problem to painting the world’s largest oil exporter — and a documented opponent of worldwide local weather motion, significantly 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 not less than two-dozen communications corporations talked about on this story — together with companies specializing in PR, consulting, promoting, and video and graphic design — have collectively earned tens of thousands and thousands 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 a whole bunch of inner firm paperwork; business award submissions and press releases; social media posts and case research revealed by workers and executives at Neom and most of the particular person corporations; in addition to hundreds 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 overseas governments to reveal details about these actions, in addition to the names of the workers concerned in them, to the DOJ.)
If Neom’s advertising and marketing supplies are to be believed, the town will quickly supply a globally built-in, carbon-free residence for billions of {dollars}’ price of investor capital and thousands and thousands of individuals from world wide, due to engineering and concrete growth marvels like The Line, a 170-kilometer-long, 500-meter-tall metropolis “powered by one hundred pc 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 the 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 surroundings,” Crown Prince Mohammed says in one other launch, this one distributed by the New York Metropolis-based communications agency Teneo. In truth, all of Neom’s areas and tasks “will probably be aligned of their respect for the surroundings and attaining stability, as a result of Neom’s formidable imaginative and prescient seeks to form the longer term through which residing 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 corporations 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 corporations 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 hinder world local weather negotiations.
Following the October 2018 abduction and dismemberment of Washington Publish journalist Jamal Khashoggi — an operation that Crown Prince Mohammed “permitted,” in keeping with a U.S. intelligence evaluation — Western elites’ shunning of the dominion in the end 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, significantly 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 with the intention to make Saudi Arabia defended by Western pursuits, ought to Saudi Arabia want that,” stated LSE’s Madawi Al-Rasheed. “When you’ve got 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 may’t simply abandon your folks.”
The crown prince is “desirous about other ways of holding Western pursuits alive in Saudi Arabia,” Al-Rasheed stated. “These tasks, these consultancy corporations, the PR firms are all meant to create that bondage — a substitute for only one commodity, and that’s oil.”
I. A ‘Golden Money Cow’: Elite Businesses Capitalize on Neom
In line with the paperwork reviewed by DeSmog, the listing of corporations which have signed contracts with Neom contains among the world’s largest advertising and marketing, promoting, and communications conglomerates and their subsidiaries, comparable 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 International, together with subsidiary Hanover Communications.
Impartial companies, comparable to Edelman, Teneo, KARV (previously KARV Communications), Ruder Finn, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck have collectively gained thousands and thousands of {dollars}’ price of extra work for Neom, as have numerous smaller artistic companies, many headquartered in New York Metropolis and London.
This listing of firms working to form Neom’s picture, which isn’t complete, omits most of the lobbying and public affairs corporations that work to form the Saudis’ popularity in Washington, DC and different capitals. It additionally omits the 23 structure studios shaping the town’s precise building, in keeping with 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 regularly 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 immediately.)
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. Today 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 finished important work for Neom, together with organizing “Uncover Neom” excursions to solicit overseas funding in cities starting from Boston and Miami to Berlin, Paris, and Seoul, in keeping with information studies and social media posts. The PR company KARV’s work for Neom, which stays ongoing, can also be run by 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. Now we have 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 certainly one of them.”
DeSmog’s findings recommend that many PR and consulting firms have anchored themselves within the profitable ecosystem of Neom and the Saudi authorities, partially 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 consumer providing “limitless content material budgets.”)
In conversations with DeSmog, a former worker of a sustainability-focused subsidiary of one of many world’s largest communications conglomerates described witnessing an aggressive, even determined, push to win a contract with Neom.
The pitch, which ultimately concerned among the conglomerate’s most senior executives, was for work to advertise certainly one of Neom’s broadly touted environmental tasks. 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 have been instructed that the company’s participation within the pitch was important as a result of the company had such a powerful popularity 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 go away the corporate after concluding that their place was now 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 tasks are truly inexperienced — or whether or not they’re even ever prone 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 straightforward cash, with extra to return,” stated DAWN’s Sarah Leah Whitson.
II. ‘A Clean Canvas’: Crafting a Handy Narrative
In response to a collection of detailed questions, in addition to requests for an interview and feedback for this story, a spokesperson for Neom emailed an announcement to DeSmog: “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is dedicated to internet 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 internet zero emission zones upon completion, as we proceed to concentrate on leveraging one hundred pc renewable power sources with solar and wind being considerable on this area of Saudi Arabia. Within the building section of our developments, we’re centered on decarbonizing, with the mixing of round economic system rules together with the usage of carbon seize and utilization expertise 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 corporations 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 corporations both declined to remark or didn’t reply. The embassy additionally didn’t reply.
To be able to work for the Saudi authorities, many firms conform to aggressive confidentiality and nondisclosure phrases. Earlier this 12 months, for example, McKinsey, Teneo, M. Klein & Firm, and BCG defied a subpoena from the U.S. Senate Everlasting Subcommittee on Investigations, which was analyzing the Saudi authorities’s efforts to affect U.S. coverage by ways comparable to “sportswashing,” telling senators that Saudi officers wouldn’t enable them to debate their work.
“It’s merely staggering to me that American firms should not solely keen to just accept this declare, permitting the Saudi authorities to find out what’s permitted to supply this subcommittee, but in addition that they might 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 corporations.
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 one hundred pc renewable power to creating hyper-connected communities centered round nature, not roads — [Neom’s] ‘residing laboratories’ will embrace expertise 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 position in Neom’s “made to vary” video. “Designed to encourage, it affords a tantalizing glimpse of what the longer term 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 inner 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 vary” video (a part of what the company referred to 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 residing.”
“The artistic concept from McCann London positions Neom as a change-maker that may 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 put up by Pleasure Movies, a manufacturing firm that labored on the “made to vary” video and has been concerned in selling quite a few Neom tasks.
The “clean canvas” narrative is one which the Saudi authorities has promoted eagerly. “Since we now have [an] empty place, and we need 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 building. The land’s longtime residents embody members of the Huwaitat tribe, who the Saudi authorities started forcibly evicting originally of 2020, in keeping with a report from the worldwide nonprofit ALQST for Human Rights. The tribal group, whose members had lived for hundreds of years in what Western artistic 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 not less than 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 demise. In 2020 Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti, a distinguished Huwaitat protestor, was killed by Saudi particular forces in his residence. Earlier this 12 months a former Saudi intelligence official instructed the BBC that the federal government had “licensed the usage of deadly power in opposition to whoever stayed of their residence.”
The compelled eviction of the Huwaitat tribe and the demise of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti haven’t captured world consideration in the identical manner because the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi. However these developments have nonetheless been broadly reported within the media and publicized by human rights advocates. In Might 2023, a bunch of unbiased specialists appointed by the UN warned that three members of the Huwaitat tribe have been dealing with “imminent execution” for opposing their eviction for The Line. “We urge all firms concerned, together with overseas traders, to make sure that they aren’t inflicting or contributing to, and should not immediately linked to, critical 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 an almost $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 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 prone to proceed. “Spreading such massive quantities of capital … by such a broad spectrum of elite American firms precludes that form 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.
In truth, 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 — comparable to decades-long jail phrases for social media posts important of Neom or the federal government itself — appear solely to have created extra demand for elite popularity cleaning.
One PR business 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 Net of Contracts
In 2023, the 12 months after it painted Neom as “made to vary,” 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 vary” 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 “probably the most visionary, formidable, thrilling, and motivating tasks I’ve ever seen,” Sir Martin wrote of “made to vary.”) Monks referred DeSmog to its assertion on trendy 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 Artistic Works, an operation throughout the tech big that helps firms monetize Google customers’ knowledge and a spotlight. In line with 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 concentrating on of searching habits by Google search and YouTube customers to vary how viewers considered Neom.
The marketing campaign’s entry level was a collection of “15-second teaser video advertisements” on YouTube and different platforms. If viewers engaged with the teaser movies, they have been then “routinely 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. Most of the movies emphasised Neom’s environmental claims. Neom is “a completely new mannequin for sustainable residing,” acknowledged one video. “Name it what you need, nevertheless it’s a spot that’s going to vary the best way 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 group!” For McCann Enterprise’s half, the “what’s Neom?” movies concerned a group of not less than 14 staff, in keeping with a celebratory LinkedIn put up by the corporate’s chief artistic officer.
“Exaggerated and detrimental 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 wanted to deliver the reality to the entrance web page. And right now’s entrance web page is the Google outcomes web page.”
In line with McCann Enterprise, for the 2023 mission it employed Ipsos, a survey agency, partially 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 have 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 12 months, KARV had signed a $980,000 contract to supply “Neom management” with “strategic communications and media relations,” together with “strategic positioning counsel” and “messaging and editorial assist,” 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 Middle, 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 deliver in additional than $3 million.)
In an announcement emailed to DeSmog, a KARV spokesperson stated, “KARV works along side Richard Attias & Associates in offering strategic communications, messaging, and media relations assist to Neom because it goals to handle the world’s best challenges by developments in healthcare, schooling, financial alternative, and sustainability.”
Among the many quite a few tasks that “what’s Neom?” sought to introduce to the world was Trojena, Neom’s ski resort and certainly one of its most closely promoted endeavors. In truth, 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 vary,” the U.S.-based McCann New York had been gearing as much as assist launch the mountain resort.
Trojena, in keeping with the “STORY OF NEOM” inner 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 deliver this implausible-sounding idea to life, McCann New York labored with Pleasure Movies — which was additionally concerned within the “made to vary” and “what’s Neom?” campaigns — to create a video portraying a bunch of skiers and snowboarders racing uphill within the snow, by an avalanche, earlier than taking pictures into the sky underneath 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 spice up 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 shifting billboards in Riyadh, Occasions Sq., and London’s Piccadilly Circus.
This marketing campaign put Neom’s dedication to sustainability entrance and heart. Generally the message was implicit: Winter sports activities, by definition, require water and chilly temperatures. Different occasions, the companies have been extra direct. “Trojena will redefine mountain tourism for the world by creating a spot primarily based on the rules of ecotourism, highlighting our efforts to protect nature and improve the group’s high quality of life,” learn one unattributed quote included in a case research revealed by Squint/Opera, a UK-based artistic 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 attaining Neom’s long-term ambitions by adhering to the rules of sustainability.”
Pixel Artworks, Pleasure Movies, and Squint/Opera have every gained different contracts with Neom. All three, for 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 tasks like Elanan, Trojena, and The Line truly 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 essential perform for the Saudi authorities.
“I feel 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 ladies’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 alternate for silence,” Lina Alhathloul stated.
IV. ‘Hydrocarbons…for Many, Many Many years 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 area branded with Neom’s brand and emblazoned with environmental imagery. A few of the constructing’s partitions gave the impression to be lined in greenery. An almost floor-to-ceiling graphic described Neom as “redefining the round economic system” and “powered by one hundred pc 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 partially by the identical Pixel Artworks that had finished work for Trojena and The Line, hosted a collection of conversations concerning the metropolis’s progress and potential. Many of those occasions appeared designed to create the picture of a authorities main the struggle 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 distinct tackle the federal government’s local weather agenda. Throughout a dialogue about “mitigation by proactive motion,” Adel Al-Jubeir, the Saudi minister of state for overseas affairs — and, since 2022, the nation’s local weather envoy — instructed the viewers, “We need to be a practical associate, and we would like the world to be reasonable,” using a standard 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 principal supply of power for the world for a lot of, many many years to return,” Al-Jubeir stated.
Saudi Arabia is the most important exporter of oil on the earth. Practically two-thirds of presidency revenues stem from oil. Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil big valued at round $2 trillion, is without doubt one of the world’s Most worthy 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 price round $160 billion. (McCann Worldgroup, Hill & Knowlton, Publicis, BCW, IPG, Mathematic, and FleishmanHillard are among the many Western promoting and PR corporations named on this story which have additionally labored for Aramco. The oil big has additionally spent thousands and thousands of {dollars} on sponsored content material offers with the in-house artistic studios of Western media retailers, together with the New York Occasions, Monetary Occasions and Reuters, in recent times, in keeping with earlier reporting by DeSmog and Drilled).
“We’re making an attempt to redefine how companies coexist with nature,” Rayan Fayez, Neom’s deputy CEO, instructed Richard Attias at a 2023 FII Institute occasion. “The whole lot that we’re doing right now at Neom has nature and surroundings on the core.”
But the town’s building 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,” comparable to Diriyah, a $63 billion tourism growth that may supposedly boast 38 motels, and Jeddah Central, a waterfront mission for which the Saudi authorities has additionally confronted criticism for forcibly evicting native residents — will depend on persevering with to promote as a lot oil as attainable, for so long as attainable.
“The crown prince [is] fearful 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 will depend on 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 scale back the dominion’s personal reliance on fossil fuels — an purpose Neom would possibly in actual fact assist if its photo voltaic power, desalination, “inexperienced” hydrogen, and different renewable power tasks come to fruition — the dominion continues to work diligently to hinder efforts that might 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.” Due to its negotiators’ savvy ways, together with sowing disagreements amongst completely different international locations, 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 direction of these it helps,” Depledge argued.
Greater than 15 years later, Depledge instructed DeSmog that what she wrote in that 2008 paper “almost 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, formidable world local weather motion is … extra of a risk than local weather change itself.”
Final 12 months the nonprofit Centre for Local weather Reporting (CCR) revealed the existence of a Saudi authorities effort, generally known as the Oil Demand Sustainability Program, which “goals to spice up oil consumption throughout Asia and Africa, with the last word objective of defending Saudi oil revenues from efforts to section out fossil fuels,” CCR’s Lawrence Carter and Tom Costello wrote. Ultimately 12 months’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 certainly one of a bunch of oil-dependent international locations already working to ensure the upcoming UN summit in Azerbaijan doesn’t name for a world phaseout of fossil fuels, in keeping with the Monetary Occasions.)
Whereas Saudi Arabia is much from the one nation dedicated to obstructing and delaying local weather motion, its efforts have confirmed significantly profitable and, as Depledge and her co-authors famous, offered cowl for america different nations that profit from continued fossil gas manufacturing however would moderately not be seen as spoilers.
Then there’s the environmental influence 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 tasks can match their inexperienced hype. The Line, for example, “would require a very colossal amount of supplies, with emissions seemingly a lot increased 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 Avenue 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 pretend snow. ‘Protect the surroundings’ when it is advisable to create new snow? It’s simply not credible,” ALQST’s Lina Alhathloul instructed DeSmog. “The Line truly cuts the surroundings and removes all [of] the character and all the animals. It removes it utterly.”
Trojena and The Line are “the 2 most well-known tasks in Neom,” Alhathloul stated, and “the 2 principal tasks 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) applications, together with by creating movies that “inform the story of CSR and its influence on the beneficiaries and the area people.”
Within the contract, Ruder Finn described itself as “a women-owned enterprise with a powerful dedication to variety and inclusion.” Members of the LGBTQ group routinely face repression by the Saudi authorities. Lina Alhathloul’s sister, Loujain, stays certainly one of quite a few ladies’s rights activists in detention. “Saudi Arabia’s personal report on ladies’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.
A number of 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 supply “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 the same path. In line with 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 usher in $840 million in income that 12 months. Since then, nevertheless, Edelman has signed not less than a dozen extra contracts and contract extensions with Neom and the Saudi authorities. Collectively these tasks seem prone to generate greater than $10.8 million for the agency, in keeping with 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, certainly one of Neom’s flagship tasks. A number of months later Richard Edelman registered with the DOJ as a overseas agent representing the Saudi tradition ministry. The next 12 months 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 situated in Oxagon, a floating industrial growth “powered by renewable power.” (Edelman, Teneo, and Landor have additionally promoted Oxagon.) Hill & Knowlton, a U.S.-based agency, seems to have gained business awards for its work for Neom Inexperienced Hydrogen Firm, together with a marketing campaign titled “Pioneering a inexperienced hydrogen future,” which gained an business award for “Greatest 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 12 months Hill & Knowlton merged with BCW to kind Burson, which itself is a part of London-headquarted WPP, one of many world’s largest communications conglomerates. In line with 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 price of labor.
Burson shouldn’t be the one WPP subsidiary to work for Neom. Landor (previously Landor & Fitch) “labored by 24-hour shifts” to create Neom’s “model concept and narrative,” in keeping with a case research written by the corporate. Landor has been supporting Neom “since 2017,” one govt stated final 12 months, and has “many extra Neom tasks within the pipeline.”
VI. ‘You Need to Keep That Picture’: Notion Is Actuality
The net of Western companies’ involvement with the Saudi authorities can seem infinite, seemingly with stronger and extra quite a few connections than will ever turn out to be public. Even so, one agency stands out for its success cashing in on the thought of Neom.
In line with 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 price greater than $2 million, Teneo agreed to supply 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 have 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 wrestle 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” have been Khashoggi’s closing phrases earlier than his demise.
In its federal filings concerning the $900,000 settlement, Teneo stated it might “handle the Neom Communications Division” and “present management of the division in addition to workers assets to make sure the overseas principal’s company messages and positioning are successfully communicated.” The corporate’s tasks included making ready “a Disaster Preparedness functionality for Neom,” in keeping with the contract. Teneo signed two extra contracts with Neom in 2020, bringing in an extra $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 not less than 9 extra contracts and contract extensions with Neom, the PIF, and one other entity created partially by the PIF (and 80 p.c owned by it) that, in Teneo’s phrases, exists “to supply steering and resourcing to assist companies and business within the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] area as they play their half within the world transition to internet zero.” All collectively, Teneo’s work for the dominion seems to have been price greater than $30 million to date.
“We’re additionally establishing a mannequin for sustainable residing world wide,” 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 not possible to map in full. This opacity stems from a robust mixture of aggressive nondisclosure agreements, strident company obfuscation, and an amazing torrent of promoting 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 actual and the imaginary seems irrelevant: The picture of Neom as a sustainable metropolis of the longer term is in the end what issues.
What’s inescapably actual, nevertheless, is the amount of cash 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 type of dictatorship is [to] make imagine that all the things is so rosy and nice,” stated LSE’s Madawi Al-Rasheed. “And for those who’re concentrating on companions such because the West — firms, world companies, banks — you then don’t need them to listen to concerning the dangerous aspect of the nation. You need to preserve that picture.”
Extra reporting by TJ Jordan
