Marketing loves a crisis. It can name five already faster than it can fix them: AI as infrastructure, the consumer reset, the rise of trust, the fragmentation of attention, and the demand for measurable growth.
Each of these five trends is real, and each is so embedded in everyone’s vocabulary that naming them can feel like having dealt with them. But when you say a warning often enough, it stops being a warning.
Communicate took these five trends to leaders across agencies, brands, platforms and corporate communications to challenge that reflex of mistaking the naming for the fixing, and see what can really be done to stay ahead.
Before we get started, Tahaab Rais, Group Chief Strategy Officer and Film Director at Publicis Groupe MENAT, challenged that premise from the outset: “While I agree with the five ingredients of the agency of the future, I am less convinced they should be treated as separate,” he said.
“To me, these are five consequences of one much larger shift: that marketing is moving from an age of mass persuasion to an age of earned relevance.”
Treat the trends below as a checklist instead.
One: AI is now infrastructure
The debunk: AI alone is not an advantage
AI adoption is nearly settled. McKinsey’s 2025 survey found 88% of organizations regularly using AI in at least one function. But nearly two-thirds have not begun scaling it, and only 39% reported an enterprise-level impact on profit.
This highlights a widening gap between access and advantage.
“The more useful version is that AI raised the floor for everybody at the same time, which means it stopped being a differentiator faster than any technology I have worked with,” said Tarek El Sarw, Senior Manager Digital Marketing at Al-Futtaim Electric Mobility from the client side.
The edge used to come from scarce access. Gen AI spread in the opposite direction, to everyone at once, which is why calling AI “infrastructure” may actually describe it better.
“Rather than AI being a ‘foundation,’ I would say AI is an accelerator. It’s the high-velocity engine that supercharges human capability by processing data, conducting deeper, quicker research, and outlining content. That in turn allows our people to focus on high-value creative and strategic thinking contributions,” commented Ziad Hasbani, Regional CEO of Weber Shandwick MENAT.
Rais names the real casualty of AI as “the collapse of average.” Once AI can generate a competent headline or content calendar in seconds, the premium moves to what cannot be automated: judgment, great taste and cultural intelligence.
“AI will soon become standard,” adds Bana Shennak, Strategy and Planning Director, PR and Influence, at Memac Ogilvy. “The real competitive advantage will come from the quality of the thinking behind it.”
This is where the real work starts: auditing what your team understands that a rival’s model does not, while nurturing the empathy, taste, strategy and critical thinking required to master more powerful AI.
Two: Consumer spending has reset
The debunk: Not cheaper. Just stricter
Economic uncertainty handed marketing a convenient character: the price-sensitive consumer. But the same consumer buys discount groceries on Tuesday and books a premium holiday on Friday, as Rais puts it.
Consumers, he said, “have not simply become cheaper. They have become stricter” — trading down in one part of life and up in another.
NIQ figures shared with Communicate show that 64% of Middle Eastern consumers will pay more for products that make everyday tasks easier. This figure is up from 46% a year earlier, and ahead of the 52% global average.
From the client side, Lara Geadah, founder of Dubai-based Cameo Performance reads that value has detached from the price: “Budgets are not shrinking, even in a Dubai summer, so much as they’re getting suspicious.” Her company offers a “pay-on-performance” model, where clients pay based on the performance their PR campaign delivers.
So the reset is not a retreat from spending, but a higher burden of proof on it.
Three: Trust is the new currency
The debunk: Trust is not something marketing owns
Rowan Saghayroun, Head of Communications at Snap Inc. KSA, has watched trust turn “into a business driver rather than simply a brand value.” Snap’s research with Mindscope across Saudi Arabia and the UAE found 96% of consumers share content privately every day.
“For brands, that means moving beyond broadcasting messages and instead earning attention through credible creators and authentic storytelling that create genuine value for consumers,” Saghayroun tells Communicate.
That has changed the evidence consumers demand.
“Five years ago, a brand could publish its values and get credit for them… That currency is worthless now,” says Dana Tahir, CEO of Havas Red Middle East.
Trust in 2026 runs on “evidence and verification”: make your actions checkable, invest in third-party proof and earned coverage, “because what others say about you now outweighs anything you say about yourself,” says Tahir.
She explains that Saudi audiences can tell whether a brand is genuinely invested in the market or has merely translated a global campaign into Arabic. Across the GCC, a poor experience cannot simply be out-campaigned.
Hasbani frames the same logic as a regional business case. “When organizations deliver on their promises, that credibility hardens into trust, and gradually builds reputation, unlocking wider commercial growth opportunities. Finally, it culminates in resilience. It’s the ‘capital’ that absorbs geopolitical shocks and protects organizational value when the environment changes.”
That is why, if trust is the new currency, you earn it in a market you have taken the trouble to understand and cater to.
Four: Attention is fragmenting
The debunk: People can pay attention — only selectively
In popular understanding, “fragmented attention” means that people can no longer concentrate. But this is largely untrue.
The Reuters Institute’s 2026 Digital News Report found social and video networks had overtaken news organizations’ own sites as the most widely used route to online news. It’s 54% against 51%.
Sherry Italia, a communications manager working with IBM, sees it through the lens of her own media habits: she still reads traditional media, but now also follows a select number of independent journalists, newsletters, podcasts and creators.
“We’ve all become our own editors,” she says. “The front page doesn’t define the conversation anymore; it’s just one of the places where it happens.”
Within that fragmented landscape, a new gatekeeper has also emerged. “People ask an AI to search a question and get one synthesised answer,” Geadah notes, “sometimes without ever clicking through to a source. This is a kind of risk almost nobody was managing two years ago,” she says.
Joe Abou-Khaled, Regional Executive Creative Director at IMPACT BBDO MENA, argues there is a new differentiator to grab attention:
“Narrative depth is the new differentiator. Not creative excellence in the traditional sense, but the ability to sense how a story needs to exist in the world right now, and then craft it in a way that feels inevitable.”
While the reflex is to read “attention is fragmenting” as licence to make more, cheaper, shorter things, this is exactly how you vanish into the fragmentation you feared. Use that info as you may.
Five: Growth must be measurable
The debunk: Not all data is meaningful
This trend might be the hardest to argue with.
Leaders must now explain not just what people saw, but what changed because they saw it.
For El Sarw: “Every ecosystem marks its own homework, and numbers sometimes do not reconcile.”
His fix is a yardstick you control: “One measurement standard that you own. Not the platforms’.”
The industry has reached its maturity stage, Geadah argues, and clients now know the difference “between a strategy and a guess”: what they want “isn’t hope, it’s proof”: results that hold up when someone asks what they actually got.
Which is where the danger starts, because what is easiest to measure gets mistaken for what matters most. A click leaves a tidy trail, but brand memory is harder to track.
“The pressure has quietly moved from proving ROI to proving incrementality. Those are very different questions, and most reporting still answers the easy one,” says El Sarw.
Optimise everything around the fastest measurable return and you get a company good at harvesting existing demand and bad at creating future demand.
The winning recipe
These five are part of one bigger transformation, so the response cannot naturally be five separate tactics.
“Instead of treating earned, owned, paid, social, AI, and influencer marketing as separate disciplines, we bring them together around a single business objective,” says Shennak.
Abou-Khaled pushes the argument somewhere else: “AI is a tool. Trust is a currency. The fragmented media landscape is a reality. Consumers are intentional. Impact is measurable. But none of these things are actually changing what we do creatively. They’re functional infrastructures through which creative thinking has to flow.”
For El Sarw, winning also requires owning the evidence: “One measurement standard that you own. Not the platforms’.”
And perhaps Paul Shearer, Director at Great Guns and Group CCO of MEMAC Ogilvy, has the shortest instruction of all: “The more open minded you are, the faster you will succeed.”
The recipe, then, is not owning the technology stack, but rather owning the strategy to connect the stack, the thinking, the creativity and the proof around the same business problem.
So what?
AI becomes universal, consumers turn selective, trust matters, attention scatters, measurement sharpens. What changes now?
“The first draft can be automated,” Italia notes, “but good judgment cannot. Some of the most valuable conversations I have don’t start with ‘How should we announce this?’ They start much earlier: ‘What problem does this solve? What are we not seeing?’”
The best of the work, she adds, “is the conversation that changes a decision before it becomes a headline.”
The five trends are identical on every competitor’s slide, so knowing them confers nothing.
Each raises a bar of what deserves producing, what deserves buying, what deserves attention, what deserves believing. Then, each measurement asks whether any of it worked.
Where advantage sits is the work almost no one does: asking real people real questions, and checking the answer against your own evidence rather than the industry’s mood.
So what if you know the trends? The question is what you did the morning after.
(This article appeared in the October 2026 print issue of Communicate. Read more insights from industry leaders and experts in the full issue here )
