Managing digital marketing for one of the UAE’s most recognised F&B brands across 9+ locations.
Running the full digital marketing operation for PizzaExpress UAE, with AI tools in the daily workflow and a lot of coordination between teams, agencies and global partners.
The situation
A global brand with a lot of local moving parts.
PizzaExpress UAE operates across 9+ branches. The brand equity was already there. The hard part was executing consistently across every location while balancing global brand guidelines with what the local market needed.
Everything customer-facing came through me: Instagram, influencer partnerships, the loyalty program and WhatsApp campaigns for individual outlets.
What I did
Full ownership of digital across a multi-branch F&B operation.
Content Strategy
Monthly content calendar across Instagram and Facebook for brand and outlet accounts.
Influencer & PR
Multi-month influencer campaigns: briefings, approvals, and performance tracking.
Paid & CRM Campaigns
Paid ads, email, and WhatsApp campaigns at brand and outlet level.
Loyalty Program
UAE Loyalty Program execution with global partners.
AI-Powered Workflows
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Notion AI integrated into daily production.
Reporting
Consolidated performance data across all channels for leadership reporting.
Key learnings
Three lessons from running a global brand locally.
- F&B marketing runs on short deadlines. A menu launch needs content, ads and comms live within hours. AI tools are what kept the quality up at that pace.
- Half the job is coordination. Keeping operations, management, agencies and global partners on the same page mattered as much as the creative work.
- Local context wins. The content that worked best spoke to what UAE customers cared about, while staying inside the global guidelines.
Tools used