For decades, out-of-home was advertising’s blind spot, the one channel every brand insisted “worked” and no CMO could actually prove. You bought the biggest board on Sheikh Zayed Road, you crossed your fingers, and you moved on. Ihab El Yaman, founder and CEO of MEmob, has heard the pitch a hundred times. He’s done pushing back on it.
“Out-of-home is not anymore pray and spray,” El Yaman says. “There’s a lot of pre-planning aspect to it.” And it’s an expensive habit to break: “With a million dirham, you can do a lot online and you can actually measure that versus what you can do on the street- with a million dirham, you just put it down and you pray that it’s going to work. And you never know if it’s worked or not.”
That tension, between OOH’s outsized emotional appeal and its historic inability to prove itself, is exactly what’s pulling budgets toward digital. And it’s why, across Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, a new category of “location intelligence” companies is trying to do to billboards what programmatic did to display: replace assumption with evidence.
From guesswork to geospatial corridors
MEmob’s pitch is straightforward: if you can anonymously track how millions of devices move through a city, you can plan OOH the way performance marketers plan a paid social campaign, around an actual audience, not a street’s reputation for being busy.
“The geospatial perspective from the UAE side of the business, it’s a little bit straightforward,” El Yaman explains. “Sheikh Zayed Road, whatever, you know it. But when you go to Berlin, UK, Saudi, when you go to these international markets, it is really difficult to decide based on, yeah, I prefer that location because it’s busy or not.” Instead, he says, “we know population, we know home location, we know work location, we know the patterns of where do you move around. We can build our own geospatial corridors of movement where it tells you the busy streets, the times, where, when, who.”
A recent MEmob+ engagement for a global airline evaluating a new Berlin route shows what that looks like in practice. Mobility signals identified 95,245 reachable travellers moving through Berlin Brandenburg Airport, split across four behavioural personas: Leisure Explorers (49.6%), VFR Travellers (23.8%), Business Connectors (16.4%) and Resident Flyers (10.2%) ; each with distinct dwell times, visit frequencies and geographic footprints. Crucially, the model didn’t stop at counting them; it traced where these audiences concentrated and how they moved across the city. Leisure Explorers clustered around Mitte and Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, VFR travellers were embedded along residential corridors such as Sonnenallee and Karl-Marx-Straße, while Business Connectors followed the Tempelhof and southern business corridors. The analysis found that 25% of Berlin’s observed international travel demand was already directed toward Asia, the Middle East and Africa, while Eurowings and Lufthansa captured 82.4% of the existing market revealing where a new long-haul route could compete for and displace existing demand before a single seat was booked.
That’s the shift El Yaman is describing at street level, playing out at network scale: media planning built on where people actually go, not where planners assume they go.
The question every CMO should be asking
If there’s a single message for marketers heading into 2027 planning cycles, it’s this: stop accepting OOH reporting that stops at a car count. “Today, the main interest for their client is to prove that what they are delivering as a plan is going to work,” El Yaman says. His advice to CMOs sitting across from an OOH provider is blunt: “Do you have…can you deliver attribution to ourselves? Can you give me a quantitative number of how many people passed through the out-of-home placement? Was it effective? And who are they? What are the profiles of the people that they have seen my ad?”
He’s equally direct about why traditional metrics fall short. “The measurement that they use for out-of-home, it’s a multiplier,” he says, an estimate of how many people were in cars that passed a sign, not evidence anyone saw it. “When you come to the data level, you rely on the device IDs as a unique passing through that street. So you’ll be able to quantify the number of unique people that have seen your ad, with the frequency, visitation to that street, and even who these are.”
And crucially, he argues, that data can now close the loop to real business outcomes, not just impressions. “Imagine today we’ve seen devices passing through that street for a month or two weeks, and then we put a geofence over a store,” he says. “We’re going to be able to tell, out of that whole out-of-home placement, you were able to generate 5,000, 3,000, 2,000 people, you never know, right?”
Closing the loop: From street to store to screen
The bigger prize, El Yaman argues, isn’t measuring OOH in isolation; it’s stitching it into the rest of the media mix so a billboard stops being a dead end. “There’s technologies as well today, like MIVA, where we can actually, if we sit on your website as a tagging on your website, we will be able to tell how many people pass through that out-of-home placement and they ended up going to your own website, because we collect cookies, we connect it to device IDs, we have our own methodology internally,” he says. “So it doesn’t only rely on retail, it can go to e-commerce.”
That’s the “digital out-of-home convergence” marketers keep promising and rarely deliver: retail visits, mall traffic, restaurant footfall, airport movement and website conversions, all read against the same exposed population. It also means every persona in a plan can be scored by how well it actually engages, not just how many devices pass a screen, in MEmob’s own Berlin analysis, for instance, VFR travellers logged the longest average dwell times and the highest repeat-visit rates of any segment, exactly the kind of granular read that tells a planner which audience to lean into and which to drop.
None of it, El Yaman is careful to note, requires knowing who anyone is. The device IDs behind every corridor, persona and conversion number are anonymised at the point of collection — mobility patterns without names attached — which is precisely what lets the model hold up under the GCC’s tightening data-privacy expectations while still answering the questions clients actually ask.
Agencies, take note
The shift isn’t only a CMO conversation as it’s reshaping how agencies plan across borders. El Yaman describes a familiar scenario: an agency’s Dubai office fielding an international OOH brief and having to lean on local partners abroad to pick locations “on perception.” His counter: “Use the technology and the data to have eyes outside, not to rely only on perception… It will be data-led planning, because data today will infuse and empower your AI that you’re using inside the agency, to give you the closest route towards truth.”
Not fully grown up yet
For all the momentum, El Yaman is candid that GCC out-of-home maturity, and true programmatic buying, isn’t there yet. “Not yet,” he says plainly. Even “digital” OOH in the region is often just a screen fed remotely, not a measurable, addressable placement: “It’s not yet programmatic in the MENA market… you still need to call the out-of-home owner of that asset.”
He’s also wary of the smart-city gold rush turning into digital clutter. “Don’t overload it. Don’t put 20 advertisers at the day,” he warns. “This kind of misusing of that kind of technology to make more money and become greedy, rather than making it beautiful and let people look at it and let it convert, this is the problem with digital out-of-home today.”
What ties it all together, El Yaman says, is a line MEmob has been putting in client decks since before it was fashionable. “We used to say that the data is the new currency,” he says. “But then they said it’s the new oil, right? Because oil becomes currency at the same time. Since 2020, MEmob was putting this all in our presentations.”
Five years on, the region’s marketers are finally listening.
