Balady+ Utopia Campaign

Balady+ is a navigation app built in Saudi Arabia, and it draws the Kingdom's roads in 3D rather than as the flat schematic everyone is used to. Utopia is the campaign that followed its launch, and its argument is a feeling rather than a feature list: the app takes so much friction out of a journey that the drive starts to resemble an idealised version of itself.

So the campaign builds that idealised version literally. A stylised Riyadh — the Kingdom Centre and Al Faisaliah rendered in the brand's teal and violet, roads laid out clean and unhurried, live footage folded into the CG closely enough that the two read as one place. The film runs on an Arabic rap track rather than a corporate score, which puts it in the same register as the young audience it is aimed at, and every feature gets its own moment inside that world: live speed against the posted limit, a bump flagged before you reach it, a parking space already waiting when you arrive.

It ran as Shahid homepage takeovers in both languages, an emailer, social key visuals and carousels, and the storyboards that sat behind the film. A penguin who is very obviously not from around here carries the lighter end of it — proof, more or less, of the promise on the balloon: nobody knows Saudi like Balady.