Saturday, February 28th, began quietly enough, with a subtle ripple of messages on WhatsApp, posts on social media, and alerts flickering through newsrooms. In hours, a second battlefield had opened, invisible but no less real: fought not with rifles but with perception, trust, and control of the narrative. Across the Arabian Gulf, governments confronted a challenge of attention and credibility, at the backdrop of an unforgiving clock.
What followed over the next three weeks became an unexpected case study in crisis communication. Governments that had spent years building institutional trust, coordinated messaging infrastructure, and community ownership drew on all of it at once. The results were, by most expert assessments, striking.
“Speed definitely matters. You can’t wait until the crisis resolves. You need to be very quick. You need to almost think on your feet,” says Alexander Wegner, Vice President and Head of Middle East at Crestview, a strategic communications and public affairs firm.
That speed, combined with clarity, coordinated institutional structure, and a deliberate focus on ‘showing not telling’, defined the GCC’s response.
Show, don’t just tell
One of the sharpest observations from communications professionals on the ground was that governments moved beyond reassurance and into demonstration as a strategy.
“The message to the public has not just been ‘stay calm’”, says Ali Al Hamadani, Account Director at H/Advisors Dubai. “It’s been a lot more show, rather than just tell. Showing people: look at how our air defense is responding, look at how the airports are operating, look at how delivery services are working.”
At a press conference held within the first week, the UAE’s Minister of Economy and Tourism Abdulla bin Touq Al Marri, addressed food supply concerns before media coverage had caught up with the question. It was, Al Hamadani notes, a signal that governments had mapped the psychology of the situation in advance, forecasting what people would fear, and getting proactively ahead of it.
Symbolic gestures reinforced the strategic messaging. The image of the UAE president, His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, together with His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed and senior ministers walking through Dubai Mall, not surrounded by security, but visibly relaxed, making the journey from Abu Dhabi specifically to be present, carried as much weight as any announcement.
Gregg Fray, co-founder and owner of Seven Media, sees that visibility as the product of decades of relationship-building. “The UAE has spent the first 50 years building something,” he says. “The Year of Family, the Year of Community, the Year of Tolerance, all of those things give the communities, the business leaders, the workers, and the families who call this place home a real stake in the place. What you’ve got is people who will speak for you. I’ve seen it in my own community WhatsApp groups, people stopping each other from sharing unverified content, saying we trust the official sources.”
Speed, structure, and the approval problem
Speed was the word that appeared most consistently across all three conversations. But speed in crisis communications doesn’t come from urgency alone, it comes from structure built in advance.
Wegner describes what he believes was the operational architecture behind the UAE’s response. “My sense is that decision-making has been highly centralized, probably with a specialized committee sitting on top of the involved authorities, and a centralized communications team feeding into dedicated comms teams across ministries. Everything I’ve seen has been very on-message, very aligned.”
Al Hamadani translates that architecture into practical terms that any organization can learn from. The UAE’s public communications structure, he explains, is organized around single authoritative nodes—Abu Dhabi Media Office speaks for Abu Dhabi, Dubai Media Office for Dubai. Statements don’t emerge from individual entities like DEWA or RTA. By the time a statement is public, it has already cleared an approval chain that was built before the crisis arrived.
“Five minutes is a long time when someone is scared,” he says. “From a communications perspective, it’s important to distinguish between the operational and communication sides. We’re very lucky to live in this region; we’re not planning for large-scale wars. What I’ve seen work best is having clear structures to identify what constitutes a crisis, escalate it quickly, and embed that framework within the organization so you can respond fast.” He adds, in simulations and scenario planning we have run with clients, people who’ve been doing this for 25 years still get caught. The foundation is everything.”
The spokesperson question
And then came the human layer of communication. Not just what was said, but who said it and how it landed.
Wegner points to several strong spokesperson decisions. The president in his statement, but also the minister who made a couple of appearances. “She resonated very strongly with people.” Taking the point further, Wegner explains, “the statement at the hospital came across as somewhat spontaneous, but I think there was preparation behind it. That shows you can be very careful and on-message in a crisis while still coming across as authentic.”
Al Hamadani notes that the UAE in particular built out a bench of communicators suited to different audiences. “H.E. Reem Al Hashimy [minister of state for international cooperation] has been exceptional in her interviews. But they’ve also used other ministers, finding the right people for different audiences, looking at who they have, who they can deploy in various places, and putting them forward.”
The contrast with Saudi Arabia is instructive. “Saudi’s been very focused on a central message coming from various entities,” Al Hamadani observes. “There hasn’t been as many individuals being the face of it [communication]. Whereas in the UAE you’ve seen a lot of different people.”
Managing the information war
The conflict on the ground was accompanied by a parallel information warfare, one that required an entirely different playbook.
The most common form of misinformation was not, as many had feared, AI-generated deepfakes. It was old footage from other countries and other crises being mislabeled and shared as current. “With deepfakes, you can use technology; AI experts can call it,” Al Hamadani explains. “But when you’re mislabeling things and lying basically about something that happened in another country, I think for me that’s been the big challenge.
Fray identifies the trap that governments must avoid in responding to misinformation. “Often when falsehoods are being spread broadly, you pour fuel on the fire by responding to them. You have to step back, own your narrative, you’ve got to be very clear in your message, and point people toward where the truth lies. If you spend your whole time responding to falsehoods, you’re not putting forward the positive messages that matter… One of the positive messages is: Make sure you that you take the information from official sources.”
The consistent message across GCC governments has been to direct audiences to official channels, and to do so with increasing firmness. Official statements countering false claims have “gotten firmer and firmer in their language” as the weeks have progressed.
The key mechanism, all three experts agree, is filling the information vacuum before it fills itself. “When people hear a noise,” Al Hamadani says, “they need to see on official channels: we know something is happening, we’re working on it. Then the follow-up. Address the whole cycle at different levels.”
Audiences within audiences
Because there wasn’t just one audience listening. There were many and each one was hearing something slightly different. Nationals, expatriates, global investors, tourists, international media, diplomatic partners, each requiring different signals at different cadences and in multiple languages, simultaneously.
Wegner describes how the domestic response itself did double duty. “They’ve been able to address multiple audiences at once through the strength of the domestic response. The government working together across various ministries already sent a signal to the investor and business community: we have a very competent government in place. They know what to do.”
Al Hamadani maps the layers explicitly. For general residents in the UAE, the messaging centered on daily life and safety. For the business community, it was infrastructure resilience and projects’ continuity. For the international audience, it was a signal that the region remains integrated into the global system. “The core message across all these different sectors,” he says, “is that we’re still here, we’re operating as normal. This is an unusual circumstance, but this is not a permanent change.”
The decision to keep stock markets open, across the UAE and Saudi Arabia for three consecutive weeks, was itself a communications act.
What comes after
All three experts agree that the next communications challenge is already beginning: the transition from crisis mode to recovery narrative.
Fray frames it as a strategic opportunity. “Part of issue management is getting yourself in position for when recovery begins. Sheikh Hamdan held a meeting with over a hundred business leaders talking about what can be done now, next week, next month, and in the next year to help each other and build something strong and robust for the future. That level of preparedness is really important.” His advice right now is consistent: You may not want to push commercial messaging right now, but you can still add value by focusing on community, family life, and your role within the city and country. “These keep your brand strong in people’s minds, even if they’re hesitant to buy. The key is to stay aligned with public sentiment, that’s simply good communication and good business.”
Wegner expects the cadence and cast of communications to evolve. “You’ll probably see more voices from the Ministry of Economy and investment authorities. There’ll likely be a dedicated communications program—a 6 to 12 to 18-month strategy—focused on FDI attraction and medium-to-long-term appeal. The angle will shift from ‘how do we manage the threat’ to ‘how do we appeal to the kind of people and businesses we want to see in the UAE.”
Al Hamadani points to the 2024 floods as the most useful regional precedent. “That was a difficult moment that the UAE turned into proof of operational resilience. When you get to the recovery stage here, you’ll have a set of proof points from the crisis period to refer back to.
The permanent lesson
Across all three conversations, one theme returned consistently: the communications that worked in this crisis were not built in the crisis. They were built across years of institutional investment, community trust, coordinated structures, and a clear brand identity that did not need to be invented under pressure.
As Fray puts it: “Storytelling works, but only when you have the actions to back it up. Otherwise, it’s not storytelling. It’s propaganda. And this place really has the actions to back it up.”
For GCC marketing and communications leaders, the lesson extends beyond government. The organizations that communicated most effectively in the past three weeks, both public and private, were the ones that had designated spokespeople, an approval structure that could move at speed, a clear escalation process, and a narrative framework that already existed before the phones started ringing.
The most effective crisis communication does not start in a crisis. It’s built long before and revealed when it matters most.
