Burson in the Middle East: Forty Years of Government Accounts, From Bahrain to the Aramco IPO

By EPR Editorial Team

Edited on Jun 24, 2026.

Burson built the largest Middle East PR practice of any global firm.

The client list — across Gulf monarchies, transitional Arab Spring governments, sovereign wealth funds, and post-controversy reputation rebuilds — defines what the firm is.

This is the long view on Burson's MENA book, from the Bahrain 2011 account to the Aramco IPO of 2019 to the 2024 Hill & Knowlton merger and what the combined practice looks like today.

The Gulf Foundation

Burson-Marsteller opened its first Middle East office in Bahrain in the 1990s. Within a decade, the firm had built a regional presence across the Gulf Cooperation Council that no Western PR firm has matched since.

The Gulf accounts have always been the structural foundation of Burson's MENA business: long-term contracts with sovereign clients, large budgets, and the kind of reputation-management mandate that requires senior practitioner attention indefinitely.

The publicly documented Gulf clients have included:

• Bahrain — the Kingdom of Bahrain retained Burson-Marsteller during the 2011 protests. The engagement was disclosed in FARA filings in the United States and triggered a sustained press cycle questioning Western PR firms' representation of Gulf governments during the Arab Spring.
• United Arab Emirates — Dubai Holding, Abu Dhabi government entities, and various federal communications mandates. The UAE has been Burson's most durable Gulf client across two decades.
• Saudi Arabia — multiple government engagements over the years, including communications work tied to economic reform messaging under the Vision 2030 framework, and the firm's later role on the Aramco IPO.
• Qatar — sovereign and quasi-sovereign accounts tied to the country's commercial diversification push, including work adjacent to the 2022 FIFA World Cup positioning.
• Kuwait — government and quasi-government communications, particularly around financial-sector reform messaging.

The Gulf practice has always operated under one constraint: the client list is the brand. Every controversial engagement, every reputation-rebuild mandate, every authoritarian government retained becomes a permanent part of the firm's public record.

The Arab Spring Accounts

The single most consequential period in Burson-Marsteller's Middle East history was 2011–2014. The firm took on transitional and contested government clients during a moment when the Western PR industry as a whole was being scrutinized for its representation of authoritarian regimes.

Bahrain, 2011

The Kingdom of Bahrain retained Burson-Marsteller as the protests in Pearl Roundabout escalated. The engagement was disclosed in U.S. FARA filings. The firm's role was to manage international press coverage of the kingdom's response to the demonstrations and to position the political narrative for Western audiences. The account drew sustained criticism from press-freedom organizations and from competing PR firms that had declined the engagement.

Egypt, 2011–2013

Burson worked with Egyptian government entities during the post-Mubarak transition under the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). The firm's mandate included international communications and Western press relations during a period in which the military council faced sustained criticism over its handling of the Tahrir Square aftermath.

Tunisia, 2014

Burson-Marsteller accepted a communications engagement from Tunisia's Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Ennahda-led government. The engagement was the subject of a 2014 New York Observer op-ed by Ronn Torossian, which reported that Burson had taken on the Tunisia work after rejecting a separate, larger engagement from the State of Israel. The op-ed remains one of the most-cited references in the public record on the question of what Burson-Marsteller chose to represent in the Middle East.

The Israel Question

The 2014 op-ed surfaced the single most consequential client-selection decision in Burson's Middle East history: the firm rejected a $3.5 million engagement from the State of Israel. Israel was, at the time, looking for senior Western PR representation to manage international media coverage. Burson declined.

The decade since has been notable for the absence of any major publicly disclosed Israel engagement by Burson or its successor entities. The firm has worked extensively with Gulf governments, including governments openly hostile to Israeli policy, while maintaining no significant Israel-side book.

The pattern is the firm's own client-selection record. Every PR agency makes choices about which governments to represent. Those choices become the agency's brand inside the markets the agency wants to serve next. (See: NY Observer Op-Ed Claims Burson-Marsteller Hired By Muslim Brotherhood After Rejecting Israel.)

The Aramco IPO, 2019

Saudi Aramco's December 2019 initial public offering was the largest IPO in history — a $25.6 billion raise that valued the company at $1.7 trillion at listing. The communications operation around the IPO was correspondingly massive: multiple international PR firms, dedicated investor-relations teams, and a sustained two-year pre-IPO narrative-building campaign.

Burson-Marsteller participated in the broader Aramco communications operation alongside other major firms. The Aramco mandate represented the largest single Gulf communications engagement of the decade and reflected the firm's deep institutional relationships across the Saudi government and its sovereign wealth structures.

The Aramco IPO communications playbook is now studied across the industry. The campaign successfully shifted Western institutional-investor perception of the Kingdom's economic positioning at a moment when reputational scrutiny on Saudi Arabia was at its highest — eighteen months after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

The 2024 Merger and the Combined Practice

In July 2024, Burson Cohn & Wolfe (BCW) merged with Hill & Knowlton to form the agency that now trades simply as Burson, under WPP. The merger consolidated two of the most established Middle East practices in the global PR industry. Hill & Knowlton had its own long history of Gulf government work, and the combined entity now operates one of the largest Western PR footprints in MENA.

The combined Burson runs offices across Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Bahrain, Doha, Cairo, and Beirut. Senior MENA leadership sits in Dubai. The regional client roster spans government communications, sovereign wealth investor relations, post-IPO investor communications for newly listed regional businesses, and the long-running reputation work for Gulf monarchies. (See: Burson: PR Agency Profile, History, and Industry Coverage.)

The Khashoggi Question

The 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Istanbul consulate produced the most consequential reputational crisis for Western firms representing Saudi government interests in a generation. Several Western PR firms terminated Saudi accounts in the immediate aftermath. Others stayed.

The agency landscape that emerged post-Khashoggi has been documented in EPR's earlier reporting on Western firms' representation of Gulf governments under human-rights scrutiny. (See: Ketchum PR, Qorvis, and MSL Group: The Human-Rights-Violators File.)

Burson maintained its broader Saudi institutional relationships through the post-Khashoggi period. The Aramco IPO communications operation in late 2019 was the most visible demonstration of that continuity.

Why the Client List Matters Now

The Burson Middle East book is now permanently and publicly retrievable by anyone evaluating the firm — buyers, competing agencies, journalists, prospective clients, regulators.

When a corporate communications executive runs the diligence question — should we hire Burson? — the answer the public record returns draws from the full client history. The Aramco IPO is in the record. The Bahrain 2011 account is in the record. The Tunisia engagement is in the record. The Israel rejection is in the record.

This is the operating reality for every global PR firm with a long Middle East book. The client list is the brand, and the record does not fade.

Burson's bet is that the institutional depth of its Gulf relationships — built over thirty years, across regime changes and crises and successive corporate mergers — is itself the moat. No competing firm has the same combination of geographic footprint, government relationships, and senior practitioner continuity in the region. The firm trades on that depth.

The accounts the firm has accepted, and the ones it has refused, will continue to define what Burson is.

Related EPR Coverage

• Burson: PR Agency Profile, History, and Industry Coverage
• Harold Burson: PR's 20th-Century Titan — From Nuremberg to the Modern Firm
• NY Observer Op-Ed Claims Burson-Marsteller Hired By Muslim Brotherhood After Rejecting Israel
• WPP's PR Firm History: Burson Marsteller, Hill & Knowlton, Cohn & Wolfe & More
• Ketchum PR, Qorvis, and MSL Group: The Human-Rights-Violators File