For four years I was head copywriter on NEOM, Saudi Arabia's giga-project, leading Monks' work on the account. The brief never really changed: make something that doesn't exist yet feel real and credible to an audience inclined to doubt it. It is still the hardest thing I have been asked to do.
I built the tone of voice from scratch and wrote the copy guidelines the whole organisation worked to. Then I governed them. That meant being the last word on brand copy across multiple agencies, regional teams and senior stakeholders, every one of whom wanted something slightly different.
The whole copy function was three people. Two juniors below me, a revolving cast of writers, and interns who arrived with almost no experience, on a budget that never stretched to more. Which is precisely why the guidelines mattered. I trained whoever arrived, and did a great deal of the writing myself.
I directed the junior writers, briefing and reviewing their work, and held one standard across seven social channels. I also ghostwrote on LinkedIn for senior NEOM leadership. The audience went from 2.1 million when I started to 4.28 million, more than doubling.
And I concepted and wrote the destination launches. Trojena, Sindalah, Oxagon and the wider portfolio, each with its own audience and its own reason to exist. Brand platforms, campaigns, every word on NEOM.com, digital scripts, and the films on construction, milestones and partnerships.
Every render had to become words a sceptical person would believe. Push too far and it reads as science fiction, so nobody trusts a syllable of it. Pull back too far and you have wasted the most ambitious brief on earth. The job was finding the register in between, where something genuinely unprecedented sounds like a plan rather than a fantasy.
And all of it passed through a long chain of very senior stakeholders. A single sentence could take weeks and a dozen versions before it was signed off. Writing something that survives that process with its life intact is a separate skill from writing it well in the first place. It's the one I'd bring to any organisation that size.
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