FleishmanHillard

FleishmanHillard's regional shop is the principal PR brand inside Omnicom in the Gulf. Structurally it is housed under Impact BBDO — Omnicom consolidated its MENA holdings around the Impact group in 2019, with the Dubai office moving into Emirates Towers — but the FleishmanHillard name, leadership and book of business were preserved through that integration.

The agency tends to draw the same kind of work it does globally: corporate reputation and category-specialist mandates for multinationals operating in the region. The public client roster is unusually transparent — Bosch, UBS, FedEx, Agility, Bose, Fitbit, Medcare, Signify, USDEC, Western Union — and reads as a representative slice of how multinationals enter and operate in the region. Healthcare and technology are visible specialisms.

Lucy O'Brien runs the regional team day-to-day from Dubai; Jim Donaldson oversees from London as the UK & Middle East CEO. In a market dominated by WPP's PR scale, Fleishman holds a smaller but durable footprint — three Gulf offices, a senior bench, and the network connectivity that matters for cross-border mandates.

The trade-off, as with any Impact-housed brand, is that PR sits inside an advertising-led group rather than running as a standalone P&L. For clients who want their comms strategy in the same building as their creative, that is the proposition. For clients who want a dedicated PR practice unblended with advertising priorities, the choice often goes elsewhere in the Omnicom roster, or out of it.