A Deeper Look at a Decade of SaudiNational Day Communication

National commemorations derive their meaning and become rooted in collective memory through individual and institutional participation in public ceremonies and celebrations, the sharing of national values, and communication across society. These practices sustain the occasion over time and create a legacy passed down through generations. Government bodies, public institutions, and businesses contribute in different ways, translating shared national sentiments and values into films, greetings, event coverage, and other content that reflects their institutional identities and, in the case of businesses, their brands.

Saudi National Day illustrates a significant shift from formal commemoration to broad national participation involving both the public and private sectors. Observed annually on 23 September, it marks the proclamation of the Kingdom’s unification in 1932. It was first officially celebrated in 1965 and became a nationwide public holiday by royal decree in 2005. Today, the occasion is widely celebrated by citizens, with organizations playing a growing role through patriotic advertising, songs, and promotional campaigns.¹ A unified communications framework emerged in 2018, when the Ministry of Media launched an official National Day identity via the Center for Government Communication. And since 2019, the General Entertainment Authority has been issuing the occasion’s theme and visual identity, providing participating organizations with a shared creative reference that is retained across two consecutive years, such as همة حتى القمة in 2019–20, هي لنا دار in 2021–22, نحلم ونحقق in 2023–24 and عزنا بطبعنا in 2025–26.² This expansion has coincided with Saudi Vision 2030, whose “Vibrant Society” pillar connects national development with deep-rooted identity, national pride, culture, and heritage. The parallel growth of the cultural and entertainment sectors has also broadened the institutional landscape and channels through which national identity is publicly expressed over the past decade.

The occasion also carries measurable commercial and private sector weight. There is documented evidence that appeals to national identity generate more favorable responses to advertising and stronger purchase intentions, with effects that scale with how strongly consumers identify with their nation.³ Digital platforms have broadened participation by enabling more organizations to contribute to the occasion’s public communications. They have also intensified competition for limited audience attention, making content volume, format, timing, and reach central dimensions of communications around national commemorations.

And finally, the National Day has created one of the most crowded creative communications momentums. As the cultural and entertainment sectors expanded over the past decade, the space in which national identity is expressed widened with them, and the September 23 anniversary became a fixture of the creative industry's calendar, particularly with the Ministry of Media launching the “Media Excellence” award in 2019 for the annual National Day event, and the moment becoming a visible contest for creative recognition.⁴

Despite this scale, the creative work produced for National Day has not been examined systematically across organizations or over time. Existing analysis consists largely of practitioner guidance issued ahead of individual editions and single-year platform summaries, while commercial studies focus on search and spending behavior rather than the content produced around the occasion. This report addresses that gap through a longitudinal analysis of video-based National Day communication published on X and YouTube between 2015 and 2025. It draws on a fixed panel of 1,198 Saudi organizations to enable like-for-like comparison across the period. The analysis traces the growth of participation, compares the roles of public and private organizations, and examines content formats, publication timing and the distribution of audience attention.

Aim and scope

This report provides a structured assessment of how Saudi organizations deploy creative audiovisual communications to commemorate the National Day. It is based on a novel dataset of creative productions published on Youtube and X across eleven editions of the national event, from 2015 to 2025, and spanning more than 1,000 organizations.

The study addresses four thematics. First, it sizes participation, tracing the growth and frequency of activity among organizations, creatives, and produced films. Second, it profiles participating organizations, comprising public, non-profit, and private sector entities, and assesses their communication frequency, consistency, and audience engagement. And third, it examines when organizations publish relative to the National Event (September 23) and how audience attention is distributed across films, tracing how a single day has extended into a communication season. Finally, the report makes a case for shortlisting the determinants for high-performing, successful communication productions that helped influence a decade of creative work.

We held a single list of organizations constant across all eleven editions to standardize comparison over time. The panel was built from the organizations that published National Day content in 2025, including government bodies, Tadawul-listed companies, and major private companies. The analysis covers organizational publishers only; individual accounts were excluded.

Content was retrieved programmatically through the X API and the YouTube Data API. For each edition, collection covered a three-week window spanning the week before, the week of, and the week after September 23. Stories and other ephemeral formats were excluded.

• Keyword match: Every video post in the three-week window matching terms for National Day, that edition’s official theme, or the year itself.
• Peak-window sweep: Every video posted by each panel organization between 21 and 24 September, regardless of caption. Many National Day films carry no searchable text, so all collected content was filtered for relevance in the data cleaning stage.

Results from both passes were merged into a single record per creative and screened against six rules:

• One record per film and organization: Posts by the same organization were merged when published within five days of each other, at the same length to within one second, and with the same thumbnail, caption, or X media file, including where one film ran on both X and YouTube. A film posted by several organizations counts once for each.
• Acknowledging the National Day: Creatives with captions that refer to the National Day in Arabic or English, through the phrase itself, its hashtags, the edition number, or that year’s official theme, qualified to the sample.
• Offers are excluded: Creatives that explicitly promote commercial offers of products and services using the National Day as a hook were excluded from the dataset.
• Other national events in proximity to the Saudi National Day were removed: Replies to other posts and videos marking other countries’ public events or national days, such as China’s on 1 October and Iraq’s on 3 October, were dropped.

This report adopts a typology that clusters creatives into four types:

• Produced film: Made for the event and built as a film, scripted and edited, with narrative, voice-over, motion graphics, cinematic footage, or an anthem.
• Event coverage: Organizational footage of an event that took place, such as a ceremony, parade, school assembly, illuminated building, match or broadcast segment.
• Greeting or message: A person or card delivering a congratulation on behalf of an organization.
• Other: Contests, data recaps and announcements.

Of the 18,544 relevant creatives, 8,517 are event coverage (46%), 5,764 greetings or messages (31%), 3,178 produced films (17%) and 1,085 other (6%). Produced films form the unit of analysis for the sector, category, timing and audience-attention findings. All relevant creatives are retained for counts of active, new and returning publishers.

Engagement combines likes, reposts, and replies on X with likes and comments on YouTube, and is the only attention measure available across the full decade. Views are drawn from YouTube alone, as X has reported views and impressions only since December 2022. Moreover, all attention metrics are lifetime totals recorded to 15 September 2026, and publication timing is recorded relative to September 23 as before, on, or after the day of the event.

Limitations and mitigation

The report is subject to three limitations that shape the boundaries of this exercise.

Building the panel from 2025 publishers biases the sample toward organizations active today. Organizations that published in earlier editions but have since ceased activity, rebranded or dissolved are not captured, so early-year volumes should be read as a floor. The same anchoring makes the returning-publisher share a minimum bound as well, as an organization missed in an earlier edition reads as new in a later one.

Engagement and views are lifetime totals to September 15, 2026, so a 2025 film has had one year to accumulate attention and a 2020 film has had six. Comparisons of attention across editions should therefore be read with the exposure window in mind, while comparisons within an edition, such as public against private films, share the same window.

X introduced public view counts only in December 2022, so the views series relies on YouTube, which carries 520 films across 2017–2025. Engagement, available on both platforms across the full decade, therefore serves as the primary attention measure, with views used as a supporting series.

The films that led each edition

The organizations behind them

The ten organizations that reached the annual top five most often are split between the public and private sectors. The Ministry of National Guard reaches a year’s top five six times, more than any other organization. Al Hilal, Al Ittihad, Al Ahli and Al Nassr together hold 22 of the hundred strongest films of the decade, and 17 of those have come over the past three editions.

How engagements are distributed

Engagement is concentrated in a small number of organizations. The fifteen largest hold 54.7% of the decade's total and the remaining 654 hold 45.3%. The Ministry of National Guard leads on 254,157 from twelve films, while the Government Communication Centre reaches tenth place with fifty-three films, hinting at a decreasing marginal engagement return to each unit of film created after a certain point.

The past three editions alone account for almost 47% of the 2.8 million cumulative National Day engagements, led by 2023, which has the largest aggregate engagement of any year at over 615,000. Interestingly, the second largest edition was held under pandemic restrictions in 2020 and saw the biggest year-on-year incline. As for 2024 and 2025, engagement metrics saw back-to-back declines that place them 7% below the level of engagement as 2021 and 2022, and 8% below the average engagement per produced film.

How much each edition rests on its strongest films

The fifteen largest institutional publishers echo the national narrative of the National Day. They include five national government bodies, the four football clubs, two telecom operators, the national airline carrier, Aramco, Almosafer, and Soudah Development. Aside from 2016 when the number of films created was still below 100, 2018 saw the largest concentration in engagement among the top 10 publishers. Since then, participating organizations have increased and the top 10 occupied less share of engagement.

Creative mix and format

Creative communications related to the Saudi National Day rose from 164 in 2016 to 3,394 in 2025, published by 94 and 1,001 organizations respectively. Growth was steepest in first five years of the launch of public commemoration efforts, with creatives reaching 1,954 in 2020. Since then, creative publications rose by an average of 12% a year reaching an all-time high of 3,394 in 2025.

Event coverages, which are documentary videos of organizations’ participation in the National Day, top the creative mix since 2022. Before that, organizations engaged in less creative friction and tended to produce courtesy and template-based greeting videos, representing the most prevalent creative work at 56% of the creative mix in 2020. As for film productions, the most resource-demanding creative work, publications saw the largest incline within a three-year window, growing from 162 in 2018 to 423 in 2021, and today represent around 15% of the coverage mix.

Intensity of participation

Across all sampled organizations, film production rose from around 1 in 2 organizations in 2017 to a peak of 3 in 4 in 2020 and 2021. The ratio declined again in the past two editions, with 50% of organizations producing a video out of a sample of 700 and 1,000 organizations respectively.

A subset of core accounts has published National Day creatives in every edition since 2019, and as a group it averages close to one film per organization per edition. Among them, 32 entities never skipped the publication of a production film since 2020—including the King Abdulaziz Foundation, NEOM, Madinah Education Directorate, University of Ha'il Qassim Emirate, Ma'aden, Saudia, and Al-Ittihad. The core group's film participation intensity has been established at nearly 2x the average organization, characterizing a resilient National Day output over the past six editions.

Produced films rose from 44 in 2016 to 496 in 2025, with output since 2021 increasing with new entrants rather than with more frequent productions. Organizations publishing two or more films have stagnated at around 70 since 2020, while the bulk of film increases are observed with yearly entrants, 191 to 301 between 2020 and 2025. The capacity to carry a multi-film campaign, namely a teaser and a launch film, or separate cuts or even separate distinct films, remains concentrated in a small and largely unchanged group of publishers.

Newcomers and repeat publishers

Participating in National Day communications seems equally an opportunity for organization visibility and commitment toward national sentiment, as 82% of organizations have repeatedly participated and they account for 93% of films in 2025. Over the past decade, returning organizations have a higher propensity for film productions, despite it being on a decreasing trend of the past three editions, than new entrants. Moreover, the ratio of new entrants creating a film has largely held constant, outside a big drop in 2025, at around 1 in 2.

A National Day season

One-half of produced films is released on the day or one day before the National Day. Across the 2021–2025 editions, 26% of films were published on 22 September and 25% on the day itself, while 20% appeared three or more days in advance. The share of films published after the day fell from 34% in 2019 to 14% in 2020 and has remained around that since. The general trend has communications kicking-off the National Day with a film, and covering events about it into the following week.

Concentration of attention

Attention concentrates on a small number of films. In every edition since 2018, the top 10% of produced films captured between 73% and 86% of total film engagement, and in 2020, a single film featuring a song by Rashed Al-Majed released by the travel platform Almosafer drew 47% of that edition’s total.

Films released ahead of the day, and films longer than one minute, draw the most attention. Measured against the median film of the same edition, films published ahead of the National Day drew 1.95 times the edition median across 2019–2025. Films published on the day got 0.64 times the median, while films published after it had a relatively low engagement at 0.35 times.

Engagement also rises with running time. Films that exhibited larger storytelling production seem to grasp more attention among viewers, with films of one to two minutes drawing 1.38 times the edition median, and films of two to four minutes 2.32 times. Films of one to four minutes exceeded the median in every edition since 2019.

A review of each edition

2015–17

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

The progression of creative techniques

Across organizations and the wider landscape, creative approaches evolve with production capabilities, creative skills, and the willingness to invest in more costly and less conventional work. They can be grouped into three broad stages.

Shawarmer: An early creative leader

Shawarmer was among the most prominent creative pioneers. In 2016, it delivered a clear message about coexistence and confronting discrimination when most works still relied on straightforward greetings. A high-quality production followed in 2017. Its 2018 short film, about turning the seemingly impossible into reality, was a notable narrative exception that year. In 2019, it moved into animation with a distinct visual treatment. Shawarmer thus preceded many organizations in combining a clear concept with accomplished execution. Its presence among the most engaging works subsequently faded.

Military institutions: The most distinctive case

Military institutions, particularly the Ministry of National Guard, present the most compelling case in this landscape. Their near-continuous presence among the most engaging works is accompanied by a marked development in production that can be traced year by year.

Ministry of National Guard

• 2019. “Men Stand for You, Steadfast as Tuwaiq.” A work based on poetry recited by soldiers.
• 2019. “We Are Her Sons.” A motivational address delivered by an injured soldier.
• 2020. “We Wish You Well, Our Homeland, with Firm Resolve and Sound Judgment.” A fictional scene of soldiers on the southern border performing an older patriotic song.
• 2021. “Sahm Muazzi.” A fully developed film featuring well-known professional actors, based on the true story of soldiers who lose a colleague. It topped the year’s ranking.
• 2022. “Ten One.” A dramatic treatment of true stories about soldiers and their sacrifices, honoring military figures by name.
• 2023. “My Children for Her.” A film contrasting citizens’ safe everyday lives with the sacrifices of soldiers and firefighters.
• 2024. “We All Belong to Her and Serve Her.” One of the year’s most dramatic works, moving from memories of earlier Saudi life to true stories of sacrifice by soldiers and doctors. Parents’ prayers in the local dialect connect past and present.
• 2025. “The Safeguard.” Largely wordless cinematic scenes of a distinctive military display convey the dignity and strength of Saudi forces through a bold artistic performance.

The Ministry of Defense followed a similar direction with films based on true stories, from “Our Path Is Steadfast” in 2021 to “Because People Come First” in 2023. The Ministry of Interior then led the 2025 ranking with “Zero Confrontation,” a war film honoring soldiers who lost their lives, after exploring the culturally rooted relationship between society and security personnel in “Saudi Arabia Is Within Every Saudi” in 2024.

The sector continues to lead at a particularly relevant moment for communication with society, given regional conditions. Its institutions have pursued a clear and consistent direction: short films based on true battlefield stories and acts of heroism deserving recognition. National Day has become an occasion to honor fallen and injured service members and other heroes. This approach lends authenticity and emotional proximity to the work and strengthens ties between these institutions and society. The advance in production and creative capabilities is evident in the progression from poetry-based work in 2019 to the high-quality short films that followed.

Aramco: From past to present

Aramco has consistently traced the Kingdom’s journey from past to present, highlighting defining moments in its history. Its 2021 film “Haddana Matn Al Sama” portrayed Saudi heroes across historical periods, from the founding to the present, accompanied by an original song by Rashed Al Majed. The 2023 choral work “Shawahid Al Ezz” traced the Kingdom’s development since King Abdulaziz’s reign. “Min Tharaha” in 2024 revisited his life and the history and cultures of the Kingdom’s regions. In 2025, “Great Are You, My Homeland” recalled national history through milestones including the first railway, an oil pipeline, pearl trading, and an aviation school. This consistency has given Aramco a clear and distinctive National Day identity and a creative space in which to challenge itself. Each year brings a new treatment of its established elements: historical achievements, cinematic storytelling, and an accompanying patriotic song, usually choral. The music has become a distinguishing feature of Aramco’s work, with “Shawahid Al Ezz” achieving wide circulation in 2023.

Sports clubs: The strength of fan bases and the limits of creativity

The clubs’ presence developed in stages. In 2018, Al-Hilal’s “May Your Glory Endure, Our Homeland” used “Watani Al Habib” over footage of club facilities, while Al-Nassr’s “You Remain Our Pride, Year After Year” presented a short work about King Salman. In 2020, foreign staff at Al-Nassr discussed their experiences in the Kingdom in “From Different Homelands, They Came Together in a Land of Goodness.” In 2021, Al-Ittihad presented “Bilad Al Khair,” an original song by Ibrahim Al Hakami accompanied by scenes from across the Kingdom. Al-Hilal’s foreign players performed Saudi customs, including pouring coffee and wearing local dress, in “It Is Their Home.”

Clubs became particularly prominent in 2023, alongside the development of the Roshn League and the recruitment of leading international stars. Cristiano Ronaldo and his Al-Nassr teammates appeared in Saudi dress and ardah scenes in “A Homeland for Its People and the World.” Al-Hilal’s “The Day of Our Dearest Homeland,” Al-Ahli’s “The Emblem of Pride Keeps Shining,” and Al-Ittihad’s “The Finest Emblem in Celebrating Our Dearest Homeland” featured players performing local dances and offering greetings, with clear differences in production quality. This approach continued in 2024 and 2025. Some clubs used familiar patriotic songs, including “Allah Al Badi” in Al-Hilal’s “A Leader for Every Goal” in 2024 and “Watani Al Habib” in Al-Ittihad’s “Our Union Is One” in 2025.

Club engagement depends primarily on large fan bases and the use of star players. Creative treatments have generally remained similar and limited, leaving opportunities to draw more fully on clubs’ tangible and intangible assets: history, heritage, supporters, and facilities. Al-Ahli’s “Great and Proud, My Homeland” and Al-Nassr’s “We Dream and Dream, and in the Homeland of the Possible, Dreams Come True” in 2024 illustrate this potential. Both began with club heritage, history, and supporters before introducing their stars. Al-Ahli developed this approach further in “Al-Ahli, the Nation’s Ambassador” in 2025, a high-quality production highlighting achievements in sports other than football without foregrounding its familiar stars. Such examples remain limited, however, and the clubs’ creative potential is still underused.

Telecommunications companies

Engagement with telecommunications companies is modest relative to their scale and their influence on comparable occasions in neighboring countries and the wider region. They were among the most visible and advanced participants in the early period. Zain’s “Our Diversity Complements Us” was one of 2017’s most developed works, combining an original song with a message about diversity. Mobily’s “May You Be Well, Our Homeland,” also in 2017, delivered high production quality for the time and honored soldiers on the southern border. In 2019, Mobily linked the occasion to a social issue through “A Kingdom for Everyone,” in which people with disabilities performed the national anthem. stc stood out for its execution in “Homeland of Glory and Resolve” that year. More recently, these companies have mostly adopted direct or song-led approaches, such as stc’s focus on empowerment in “With Empowerment, the Impossible Becomes Possible” in 2022 and Zain’s “How We Made It” in 2024, which paired a song by Ayed with previously filmed footage. They have yet to establish a sustained presence commensurate with their position.

Other organizations

The prominence of other organizations has fluctuated. Saudia appeared in several editions with musical or historical treatments. Retal produced two notable works in 2020 and 2021, while the Ministry of Culture stood out with “Labnat Tina” in 2021 and its medley in 2022. Other distinctive appearances included Maestro Pizza’s “You Will Endure as Long as the Light” in 2022; Soudah Development’s “This Is Where the Homeland Belongs” in 2023; and, in 2025, the Royal Commission for Riyadh City’s “Riyadh Al Ezz,” the Tourism Development Fund’s advertisement, and Salla’s “A Nation of Doers.” Most of these organizations, however, have not established a sustained presence or a cumulative creative identity around the occasion.