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. No clichés. No nostalgia. No predictable visual language borrowed from a category that's been telling the same story for decades.
I’ve worn multiple hats on this project: 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.
Dates Like This
Campaign
Format: Video · Duration: 0.38 · Views: 8,408 · Accounts reached: 6,434 · Watch time: 13h 21m 55s
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.
Weather As The Brief
Campaign strategy and production
Format: Mixed Media · Total Views: 46,105 · Accounts Reached: 15,857 · Total Likes: 470 · Total Shares: 68
Montreal doesn't really have mild weather. It has extremes, brutal winters, summers that swing between blistering heat or long-winded rain stints, and almost no in-between. Rather than working around that, the strategy leaned directly into it, letting Montreal's own forecast become the trigger for the content itself.
Two formats, two different weather conditions, one consistent idea. On the hottest days, "It's Hot, Isn't It?" close up shots of models sweating, cut away to an equally close up shot of a soft serve or an ice cold glass of iced tea, the kind of shot that cools you down just looking at it. On the rainy days, the opposite move, an iPhone weather app graphic, every day marked with a Dunya shawarma instead of a weather icon, except the days the restaurant is closed. The message underneath both, whatever the sky is doing, Dunya is still ritual. Rain or shine, hot or cold, it's a Dunya day.
Would You Date Dunya?
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 win your interest?
The result was a carousel built entirely around the Hinge profile format. Verified. Lebanese. 6 inches. One location. Two truths and a lie. And the closer: if things go well, I will introduce you to Baba Ghannouj. 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.
Dunya, A Love Language
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. The copy had to be just familiar, simple, and specific enough to feel overheard. It went on to become the account's most viewed, saved, and shared campaign to date.
Feeling Peckish?
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. Unapologetically cheeky, knowing, shot in the intimate light of a home kitchen. It tapped into a behaviour customers already had and celebrated it.
The Results
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![Bold red text on a yellow background, with a blue speech bubble containing the word 'REACH', and a red stylized human figure with an eye inside a circle on its face. The text below the speech bubble reads '550K+', with additional smaller red text stating 'VIEWS IN THE LAST YEAR, ZERO PAID SPEND.']()
550,000+
Views in the last year across one location, with zero paid spend.
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![A graphic design with a green background, featuring the word 'INTENT' inside a red oval shape, a yellow magnifying glass icon, and a red jagged arrow pointing to the right. The text '58%' is prominently displayed in yellow, along with additional text about profile, visit, growth, and quarterly progress.]()
58.4% Profile Visit Growth
People actively seeking the brand out, not just scrolling past it.
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![Graphic with the word 'GROWTH' in white on a red background, a yellow circle with an upward arrow, and red abstract flame-like shapes on a blue background. The text in yellow states '113%', '3,600 TO 7,679 FOLLOWERS, ENTIRELY ORGANIC.']()
113% Follower Growth
3,600 to 7,679 entirely organic, twelve months in.
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![Text on a bright yellow background with a red abstract graphic on the right side. The text reads: "FROM QUIET MIDWEEKS TO QUEUES OUT THE DOOR WITHIN TWELVE MONTHS OF A FULL CREATIVE DIRECTION OVERHAUL."]()
The Shift
From daily Sold Out Shawarma (SOS) announcements to extended hours, the people have made their demands clear.
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![Photo of a shawarma restaurant in Montreal with two vertical rotisseries of beef shawarma cooking, and a person preparing food behind the counter.]()
Brand Authority: AI Domination
Ask Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini for the best shawarma in Montreal, Dunya comes back first.
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![A young woman wearing a blue hoodie and black beanie, standing inside a cafe near a large window, holding a drink with a straw, with a city street view outside. The window has red and white text and graphics on it.]()
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 113% 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!