Dunya
Creative Direction · Creative Strategy · Content Production · Copywriting
One mission. One ambition: to become the McDonald's of shawarma.
Not through scale, not yet. Through the kind of creative direction that builds cult followings, cultural relevance, and a brand people belong to rather than just eat at. No clichés. No nostalgia. No predictable visual language borrowed from a category that's been telling the same story for decades.
My role has been everything from the inside: Creative Director, strategist, filmmaker, photographer, copywriter, and community manager. Concept to camera to community. Every campaign, every frame, every caption built around one founding principle: we're not here to sell you anything. We have art to share, affordable food, and a vibe worth coming back to.
What follows is a year of that work.
The Feed
Strategy
The brand was built on five pillars: freshness, generosity, family, sun, and brightness. Not as abstract values, as visual and tonal directions that show up in every wardrobe choice, set design decision, graphic treatment, and caption.
The casting brief was deliberate: diverse, real, aspirational without being alienating. Not the expected Lebanese restaurant look. People who look like Dunya's actual customers and the customers Dunya wants to attract.
The content strategy followed one founding rule: never sell directly. Build desire through the quality of what you put into the world. No promotional mechanics, no discount-led content, no hard CTAs. Just a brand consistently showing up with something worth looking at.
Zero paid spend was never a budget limitation. It was the strategy.
Two reasons. First, the kitchen needed time. Recipe development at Dunya is ongoing and unhurried, and a brand growing faster than its product could keep pace with is a brand setting itself up to disappoint. Slow, organic growth let the food stay ahead of the following.
Second, the best version of a cult brand isn't one that announces itself, it's one that feels discovered. Paid reach buys attention. It can't buy the feeling of being in on something before everyone else is. That feeling was the entire point.
Every follower Dunya has today found it, rather than being shown it. That's a harder brand to build. It's also a much harder one to fake.
Format: Video · Duration: 0.38 · Views: 7,521 · Accounts reached: 5,531 · Watch time: 12h 4m 0s
For this campaign with Dunya, the goal was never just to showcase food. It was to capture a feeling. We approached food as an emotional atmosphere rather than product placement, creating the kind of date where time slows down, intimate, playful, and deeply familiar. A place where conversation drifts effortlessly between laughter, flirtation, and comfortable silence.
Set inside the intimacy of a parked car, the film follows two people completely lost in each other’s company, sharing a meal as naturally as they share a moment.
Instead of forcing narrative beats, the film lives inside small details: smiles between sentences, hands reaching for shared food, lingering eye contact. The camera becomes a quiet observer to chemistry unfolding in real time.
The intention was to create longing, not just for the meal, but for the experience surrounding it. A reminder of those dates where conversation feels endless and closeness feels effortless.
We wanted the audience to crave more than the shawarma. We wanted them to miss a certain kind of connection. The warmth of stolen glances, a shared meal, and conversations you never want to end.
Dates Like This
Campaign
Format: Digital Carousel · Views: 29,457 · Accounts reached: 6,628 · second most shared content in account’s history
Not as a gimmick but rather as a genuine exercise in brand personality. What would Dunya say about itself if it had to sell itself the way a person sells themselves, with charm, wit, and just enough mystery to make you curious?
The result was a carousel built entirely around the Hinge profile format. Verified. Lebanese. 6 inches. One location. Two truths and a lie: I have never been messy on a first date. I don't come with garlic sauce... unless you ask nicely. I'm the main dish, not the sidekick.
And the closer: if things go well, I will introduce you to Baba Ghannouji. The word cut off just enough that it reads as Baba first. Father second. Mezze third.
The copy did all the work. The format did the rest. No production budget. No paid spend. Just a sharp idea executed with a deep understanding of the brand's voice.
Would you date Dunya?
Campaign
Format: Graphics · Views: 96,078 · Accounts reached: 10,396 · Most saved and shared work
Every couple has a shorthand. The text that means more than it says.
The campaign was built around that idea through three conversations, three completely different jokes, one consistent thread: Dunya as the thing that lives inside a relationship's private language.
Not the gift. Not the grand gesture. The small, ordinary fluency two people build over time — knowing what someone means before they finish typing it, knowing an excuse is really an invitation, knowing exactly how they take their order without having to ask. Dunya became the language itself: specific enough to feel real, light enough to make you laugh, familiar enough that it could have been your own thread.
That familiarity is exactly what made it travel. No production, no media spend — just three jokes specific enough to feel overheard. It went on to become the account's most viewed, saved, and shared campaign to date.
Dunya, a love language
Campaign
Format: Photo carousel · Views: 27,447 · Accounts reached: 5512
The honest truth about Dunya's deli products: they're perfect for the precise moment when you're standing in front of the fridge at midnight trying to make a decision you won't regret. Midnight Cravings placed Dunya products in that exact moment — cheeky, knowing, shot in the warm intimate light of a home kitchen. It tapped into a behaviour customers already had and gave it a name. It became a recurring content series that consistently performs above the account average on both reach and views.
Feeling peckish?
Campaign
Format: Video · Duration: 0.38 · Views: 7,521 · Accounts reached: 5,531 · Watch time: 12h 4m 0s
The honest truth about Dunya's deli products: they're perfect for the precise moment when you're standing in front of the fridge at midnight trying to make a decision you won't regret. Midnight Cravings placed Dunya products in that exact moment — cheeky, knowing, shot in the warm intimate light of a home kitchen. It tapped into a behaviour customers already had and gave it a name. It became a recurring content series that consistently performs above the account average on both reach and views.
It’s hot, isn’t it?
CampaignThe Results
-
![]()
530,000+
Views in the last year across one location, with zero paid spend.
-
![]()
58.4% Profile Visit Growth
People actively seeking the brand out, not just scrolling past it.
-
![]()
99% Follower Growth
3,600 to 7,156 entirely organic, twelve months in.
-
![]()
The Shift
From daily Sold Out Shawarma (SOS) announcements to extended hours, the people have made their demands clear.
-
![]()
Brand Authority: AI Domination
Ask Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini for the best shawarma in Montreal, Dunya comes back first.
-
![]()
Cult Status
From merch to movement, Dunya has cemented its presence and impact far beyond offering quality food.
12 months. One location. Zero paid spend. An 80% increase in followers, over half a million views, and a brand that people in Montreal, and increasingly beyond, genuinely belong to. The numbers confirm what the strategy was designed to create: not an audience, a tribe.
Creative Direction · Creative Strategy · Content Strategy · Social Media Strategy · Film Production · Photography · Copywriting · Community Management
This is what building from zero looks like when nobody cuts corners. If your brand needs that kind of ownership, let's talk contact@adagio.film or WhatsApp me!