Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi's 'One Summer Isn't Enough' 2024 campaign by Serviceplan Middle East launched 101 curated experiences across the
ARCHIVEHow Abu Dhabi Turned 101 Experiences Into a Summer Tourism Campaign
The Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi's 'One Summer Isn't Enough' campaign, created by Serviceplan Middle East and published in the United Arab Emirates in May 2024, positions Abu Dhabi as a destination so experientially rich that a single summer visit cannot do it justice, anchoring that proposition in a curated guide of 101 must-try activities.
Now in its second consecutive year, the campaign builds on the platform established in 2023, when the central argument — that one trip to Abu Dhabi is simply insufficient — was first introduced. The 2024 iteration deepens that proposition through a concrete creative device: the 101 Abu Dhabi Do's, a visitor-facing guide that spans iconic landmarks and lesser-known local gems alike, brought to life on a first-ever tailor-made map of the emirate. The map functions simultaneously as a content asset, a planning tool, and a visual expression of the city's breadth, activating every corner of Abu Dhabi with a distinct illustrative identity.
The campaign operates as a full 360-degree effort, moving well beyond a single hero film. Mixed-media content pieces, produced by Dejavu and animated by ByFiction, carry the campaign's narrative across formats and markets. In the United Arab Emirates and across the Gulf, India, and China, the campaign deploys a dual creative strategy: celebrity-led films for the Indian, Chinese, and Arab Gulf markets run alongside vlog-style documentary content targeting global audiences. Together, these strands address both aspirational and authentic registers of travel storytelling, making the 2024 edition the most expansive execution of the platform to date. Abdulla Yousuf, Director of International Operations at the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi, stated that the campaign was designed to demonstrate to audiences that the emirate has a wide array of experiences to warrant multiple visits, according to publicly available brand communications.
ARCHIVEThe Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi targets a specific and commercially valuable audience segment: travellers who have already visited the emirate and can be persuaded to return. This strategic framing reframes the campaign's competitive challenge. Abu Dhabi is not primarily competing for a traveller's first regional visit — it is competing for their second, third, and fourth.
The competitive landscape in Gulf tourism is well-established. Dubai, which reported 14.96 million international visitors between January and October 2024 according to Mediaoffice Ae, represents the most immediate point of comparison for Abu Dhabi in global travel conversations. Positioning Abu Dhabi around depth of experience rather than volume of arrivals is a meaningful differentiator from Dubai's established brand identity, which emphasises scale and spectacle. Beyond the Gulf, Abu Dhabi competes for summer leisure travel against established Mediterranean and Asian destinations, where perceived familiarity is a powerful driver of repeat booking behaviour.
The 101 Abu Dhabi Do's device addresses a genuine consumer insight: even well-travelled visitors tend to cluster around a city's headline attractions and leave significant parts of the destination unexplored. By making discovery itself the campaign's central offer — through the map, the celebrity content, and the vlog formats — the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi gives both first-time and returning visitors a concrete reason to plan a longer or repeat stay. According to skift.com, destination marketing in the post-pandemic period has increasingly moved toward experience-led storytelling as a counter to price-based competition, a strategic context that makes the 101 Do's framework timely. Global international tourist arrivals reached approximately 1.4 billion in 2024, recovering to pre-pandemic levels according to World Bank estimates, signalling that the competition for traveller attention across the United Arab Emirates and its neighbours is now operating at full intensity.
The creative execution of 'One Summer Isn't Enough' rests on a deliberate tension between the aspirational and the everyday. Serviceplan Middle East designed two distinct content registers to operate simultaneously across different markets, each calibrated to the cultural expectations of its intended audience.
For the Indian, Chinese, and Arab Gulf markets, the campaign enlists three celebrity ambassadors: Bollywood actor Ranveer Singh, Chinese actress Liu Yifei, and Gulf entertainer Dawood Hussein, as reported by Aninews In and hoteliermiddleeast.com. Each ambassador is placed within the framework of the 101 Abu Dhabi Do's, using the tailor-made emirate map as both a narrative prop and a practical guide. The device is smart: it renders the map as something a real visitor might carry, grounding the celebrity content in the same experiential logic that governs the broader campaign. The celebrities are presented not as passive endorsers but as active explorers, discovering corners of Abu Dhabi that even returning visitors would not immediately recognise.
The global market content takes an opposite approach in tone but a complementary approach in argument. Vlog-style films follow first-time visitors from multiple countries through unscripted encounters with the city — real reactions, genuine conversations, and moments of comic surprise that emerge naturally from the experience. Produced by Dejavu and animated by ByFiction, the mixed-media content pieces give the broader 360-degree campaign a visual identity that extends beyond film. The first-ever custom map of the emirate, illustrative and deliberately designed to reward close reading, anchors all the campaign materials in a single memorable graphic world. Production credits beyond Dejavu and ByFiction for the 'One Summer Isn't Enough' 2024 campaign are not comprehensively documented in public sources. The campaign was published in the United Arab Emirates in May 2024.
No independently verified performance metrics for the 'One Summer Isn't Enough' 2024 campaign — including reach figures, engagement rates, or attributable visitor uplift — are publicly available from the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi or Serviceplan Middle East at the time of writing. The campaign has not been recognised in the Cannes Lions, Effie Awards, The One Show, D&AD, Clio Awards, Webby Awards, or WARC Awards cycles reviewed, according to available records.
Structurally, however, the campaign demonstrates several qualities associated with effective destination marketing. The 101 Abu Dhabi Do's device creates an unusually high surface area for engagement: a list of 101 items, distributed across a custom map and activated through both celebrity and vlog content, generates far more content entry points than a single campaign film. Coverage in Campaign Middle East, as reported on May 15, 2024, focused positively on the guide's creative ambition, the custom map, and the dual-track content strategy, according to cmosmagazine.com. The campaign was also noted by withfeeling.com and adsofbrands.net as a significant regional tourism effort, indicating meaningful industry attention in the United Arab Emirates market.
The platform's second-year continuity is itself a structural signal. Running 'One Summer Isn't Enough' for a consecutive summer in 2024 allows brand recognition built in 2023 to compound, reducing the awareness-building burden and allowing the creative work to operate closer to the consideration and conversion stages of the travel decision. Clapboard scores this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting a strategically coherent and well-produced effort that earns credit for its creative mechanics and multi-market ambition, while leaving measurable outcome data unverified.
'One Summer Isn't Enough' is a summer tourism campaign created by Serviceplan Middle East for the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi, published in the United Arab Emirates in May 2024. Now in its second year, the 2024 edition introduced the 101 Abu Dhabi Do's, a curated guide and custom map of must-try experiences across the emirate.
The 101 Abu Dhabi Do's are a curated list of visitor experiences spanning iconic attractions and hidden local gems across Abu Dhabi. Introduced in 2024, they appear on a first-ever custom illustrated map of the emirate and anchor all campaign content, giving both new and returning travellers a structured reason to explore more of the city.
The 2024 campaign featured Ranveer Singh targeting the Indian market, Liu Yifei targeting the Chinese market, and Dawood Hussein targeting Arab Gulf audiences, as reported by aninews.in and hoteliermiddleeast.com. Each ambassador was filmed engaging with the 101 Abu Dhabi Do's map, discovering experiences designed to appeal to returning visitors.
Serviceplan Middle East created the campaign for the Department of Culture and Tourism Abu Dhabi. Production was handled by Dejavu, with animation by ByFiction. The campaign was published in the United Arab Emirates in May 2024 and represents the second consecutive year of the 'One Summer Isn't Enough' platform.
Clapboard scores the 2024 'One Summer Isn't Enough' campaign 63 out of 100. The score reflects a strategically sound, multi-market campaign with strong creative mechanics, including the 101 Abu Dhabi Do's guide and dual-track content strategy, while noting that independently verified performance outcome data is not publicly available.
The 2023 campaign established the core proposition that one trip to Abu Dhabi is insufficient. The 2024 edition expanded the execution significantly by introducing the 101 Abu Dhabi Do's guide, a first-ever custom emirate map, vlog-style global content, and a full 360-degree media approach, making it the more ambitious iteration of the two.
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