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Natasha Matos-Hemingway brings over a decade of leadership experience across big tech and streaming companies, including Google, Microsoft, and Showmax. Today, she is the chief commercial, marketing, and product officer at content-streaming platform MBC Shahid.
During big moments like Ramadan, domestic advertising can get loud, crowded, and expensive. Most brands invest their budgets in the same place, competing for the exact same audience. But culture doesn’t stop at regional borders anymore, and neither do viewing habits.
To capture this broader opportunity over the past three years, we’ve been on a journey to go global with MBC Shahid, our streaming platform at MBC Group. We’ve done this by reaching the Arabic diaspora — those millions of Arabic speakers living outside of the Middle East — year-round. This strategy aligns perfectly with our biggest annual opportunity: driving global subscriber growth during the weeks leading up to Ramadan, when demand for Arabic content spikes worldwide.
Instead of just fighting for space in a saturated Middle Eastern market, last year we began opening our doors to international viewers during the holy month, something we have been building up for the last few years but that we really amplified this year. The initial response was huge, proving that global audiences were hungry for our content.
Supercharging global reach with diaspora insights
To build on our early momentum, we needed to pinpoint where to focus our audience acquisition efforts next during Ramadan. So for this specific campaign we turned to Google Surveys, a market research tool designed for brands to poll targeted consumer segments across web and mobile platforms.
We used it to collect insights from over 600,000 respondents across 16 international locations. The findings confirmed a massive appetite for Arabic entertainment during the holy month across major cities in the U.S., Canada, Australia, the U.K., and other markets in Europe. Crucially, the data revealed that these audiences were all different.
For example, we learnt:
- London and New York audiences have a strong preference for family-friendly entertainment.
- Australian audiences’ preferences vary by state, with Victoria favouring a broad, diverse content library, while New South Wales leans heavily towards culture-focused shows.
- California and Texas are home to highly price-sensitive audiences.
To validate these survey findings, we cross-referenced them with international Google Search trends and mapped out the global video-on-demand landscape. The data uncovered a striking reality: Arabic content commands a massive 36% of the total opportunity in the global video-on-demand market.1
High-volume search terms like “مسلسلات رمضان” (“Ramadan series”) and “برامج رمضان” (“Ramadan shows”) proved that international communities weren’t just open to content, but they were actively searching for it.
While we had already laid the groundwork globally, this data acted as our accelerant. It provided the exact plan we needed to refine our targeting, tailor our creative to market-specific nuances, and scale our international reach to a whole new level.
Programming a seasonal campaign with a long-term vision
Modern viewers’ streaming journeys don’t follow a straight line. They constantly hop between screens, apps, and platforms. To truly engage this fluid behaviour internationally during Ramadan, we knew our campaign couldn’t be a quick flash in the pan. The biggest mistake we could make would be hitting the brakes and stalling our momentum the minute the holy month ended.
“Ramadan presented an ideal opportunity to accelerate our broader international ambition,” explains Ahmed Qandil, director of direct-to-consumer business at MBC Shahid. “Using a moment of peak demand builds relationships with diaspora audiences that could extend well beyond the season.”
To capture peak demand while setting ourselves up for long-term success, we translated our audience insights into a multi-layered campaign strategy. Instead of blasting out a one-size-fits-all global message, we built a segmentation framework mapped directly to diverse diaspora groups. We accounted for cultural affinity, viewing preferences, local pricing behaviours, and languages, including Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Delivering this required managing significant operational complexity behind the scenes, from localising creative assets at scale to balancing multiple languages across diverse regions.
Our head of performance marketing at MBC Shahid, Ali Aktas, points out that keeping human connection at the centre of all that complexity was key. He says: “When you’re tailoring campaigns across five continents, it’s easy to get bogged down in the logistics. For us, it wasn’t just about translating a headline. It was about showing up with the right story, in the right language, at the exact moment someone was craving a piece of home.”
And what better place to start than Google Search?
Tag teaming to scale across international markets
Laying our foundation with Search campaigns allowed us to catch the eye of people who were actively looking for us. But as search behaviour shifts towards longer, more conversational queries, we have had to evolve.
“We structured our strategy to create a connected, full-funnel ecosystem where each channel played a distinct role across the user journey,” explains Ahmed Ossama, assistant performance marketing manager at MBC Shahid. “We used targeted creative, automated performance, and mobile campaigns to build and scale demand, and high-intent channels to capture and convert it.”
Pairing AI-driven Search with broad match and Smart Bidding allowed us to capture nuanced phrases. For example, alternative streaming titles people were looking for, or queries like “best Arabic family film to watch tonight” coming from family-focused households in London and New York. This connected us with viewers the exact moment they were ready to stream.
However, while Search captures intent, streaming is inherently visual. To turn passive interest into active excitement, we brought our video assets into Demand Gen on YouTube. This allowed us to drop engaging trailers and previews directly into Ramadan’s massive cultural moments, connecting viewers with the content they care about most. We tailored these assets to local tastes, for instance, highlighting culture-focused shows to audiences in New South Wales while showcasing our broader catalogue in Victoria.
Beyond just building hype, these mid-funnel campaigns generated rich, first-party audience signals — like deep video views and engagement patterns — that fed straight into Performance Max, making its targeting even sharper and more efficient.
From there, Performance Max took those insights and scaled them across Google platforms to reach high-potential diaspora communities in the U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, and Western Europe. For example, in price-sensitive markets like California and Texas, dynamic ads emphasised overall value and subscription flexibility to convert high-intent prospects. With AI constantly optimising in the background, Search and Demand Gen did the heavy lifting to capture intent and build interest, while Performance Max expanded our reach globally.
Once all that momentum built up, we used App campaigns to close the deal. By nudging interested viewers to download the app, we made it effortless for them to go from casual browsers to active subscribers, setting us up for long-term subscriber growth.
Unlocking new markets and new growth
The new strategy completely paid off. By stepping outside our usual region and reaching into Western markets during Ramadan, we connected with a high-value audience and turned a seasonal campaign into a massive success.
In fact, overall subscribers to MBC Shahid through Google Ads grew 6.3X, heavily driven by the international Arab diaspora whose subscription conversions skyrocketed by 9X.
Behind these numbers was a highly focused, product-led approach:
- Performance Max nearly doubled conversions while halving cost per acquisition
- Demand Gen delivered a significant conversion lift of over 20% globally
- App campaigns generated 4X more subscriptions, driving substantial long-term growth
By grounding our strategy in deep audience insights and aligning our creative with what real viewers actually wanted to watch, MBC Shahid’s original content catalogue, technical infrastructure, and localised programming gave our campaign its substance. Paired with Google’s automated tools and AI, those assets became a force multiplier, expanding our platform’s reach into millions of homes globally.
Taking a leap during the most competitive moment of the year proved something big: expanding beyond traditional borders isn’t a one-off tactic. Diaspora audiences are now a permanent, strategic growth engine driving our long-term global vision for MBC Shahid.
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