Arwa Water
A creative partnership with J. Walter Thompson to give one of the region's most distributed water brands a voice worth following.
Client: Arwa Water, Coca-Cola (via J. Walter Thompson)
Year: 2019 to 2020
Deliverable: Social Media Brand Playbook V2
Services: Brand Strategy, Social Media Architecture, Content Design, Campaign Development, Community Guidelines
Market: Middle East and GCC
The Brief
Add Hype works in two ways: directly with brands as their creative partner, and embedded within agency teams when a project calls for specialist creative depth. The Arwa work was the second model in action.
Arwa is Coca-Cola's water brand across the Middle East, one of the most distributed products in the region. J. Walter Thompson had been servicing the account and needed to take the brand's social media playbook further. Version one existed but hadn't gone deep enough. The brief was to build version two: a comprehensive system covering strategy, content architecture, campaign creative, and community management, built to work across Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
JWT brought in Ubaid Ullah Ahmed, founder of Add Hype, to lead this build. It was a collaboration from day one, with Add Hype providing the creative and strategic engine and JWT providing the client relationship and market context.
The Challenge
The Strategy
We built the entire playbook around a single brand idea: Hydrate Your Way. The insight behind it was that hydration isn't one thing. It means something different depending on who you are, what you're doing, and when. A family on a day trip needs water differently than someone finishing a workout, or an Emirati professional heading into a meeting. Arwa's range (multiple sizes, low sodium, alkaline) was already built for this. We just had to make it legible.
From that, we built the brand proposition: Arwa strikes the right balance between hydration and wellbeing. Not just a water brand. A brand that gives you the convenience of hydrating on your terms, whenever you need it, in whatever form fits your life.
The social architecture was built around five pillars, each addressing a different reason why someone reaches for water:
- Hydration: educating and inspiring around the act itself, why it matters, what it does, when you need it most
- Lifestyle: showing Arwa as an essential part of every occasion, from lunch to yoga to a family outing
- Choice: communicating the breadth of the range, low sodium, alkaline, sizes for every context
- Convenience: reinforcing that Arwa is always available, always at hand, wherever life takes you
- Balance: content that connects hydration to mental and physical wellbeing, recovery, mood, and energy
What We Built
Brand Identity System for Social
We defined exactly how Arwa should look and feel across every touchpoint. Personality: reliable, informed, confident, expert. Tone of voice: positive, inspiring, active, assuring. Language: simple, clear, easy to understand. These weren't abstract descriptors. We showed what they meant in practice through every sample post, caption, and response guideline.
Campaign Creative: #HydrateYourWay
We developed the #HydrateYourWay visual concept: Arwa bottles with UAE cultural imagery composited onto the label. This wasn't decoration. It was a deliberate creative decision to make the product feel native to its market, to make the bottle feel like it belongs in this specific place, not just on a generic shelf.
The visual treatment was striking: bottle in the foreground, motion-blurred background suggesting speed and life, the city or landscape visible through the water. It was the kind of creative that stops people scrolling.
Content System by Pillar
For each of the five pillars, we produced a full set of sample content: visual art direction, copy, and captions. This gave JWT and the Arwa marketing team a working template to brief any production partner or internal creator. The content ranged from hydration fact posts with real data points, to lifestyle photography showing Arwa at lunch, in the gym, and on the road, to product hero shots of the alkaline and low sodium variants.
Platform Strategy
We defined how each platform should be used differently rather than treating them as identical channels. Instagram for visual storytelling and UGC: real moments people share with Arwa. Twitter for trend-based content, community engagement, and data mining around hydration and wellness conversations. Facebook as the primary awareness platform for product education, range communication, and promotions.
Community Management Guidelines
We built out the rules of engagement: how to respond to fans, what voice to use (first name, active, positive), what to do when someone asks a product question versus when they're complaining. Bilingual in English and Arabic. Specific enough that a community manager picking this up on day one would know exactly how to behave.
The Outcome
The Arwa Social Media Playbook V2 became the operating guide for the brand's social presence across the GCC. The collaboration between Add Hype and JWT produced something neither would have arrived at in the same way working separately: Add Hype brought the creative system and cultural thinking, JWT brought the client knowledge and regional context. The result was a playbook that was both strategically sound and practically executable.
This kind of work represents a core part of how Add Hype operates. We're not only a direct-to-brand creative studio. We also function as a specialist creative partner within larger agency ecosystems, embedding where the work needs a different kind of thinking. For Arwa, that meant building a full social identity for one of Coca-Cola's most distributed products in one of the most competitive FMCG markets in the world. That's not a small thing.
