The MENA advertising and marketing industry is going through one of the toughest periods in recent memory. Budgets are shrinking, layoffs are spreading across network agencies, recruitment has become increasingly difficult, and entire segments of the market remain under pressure from geopolitical uncertainty and shifting consumer behavior.
Across the region, agencies describe a market that has slowed sharply since late Q1, with many advertisers cutting spending, delaying campaigns, or pushing investments into the second half of the year. Media agencies, in particular, have been hit hard as brands slash or postpone buying commitments, with with the market expected to contract by 20% in 2026. Creative agencies, while more insulated because of ongoing adaptation work and demand for fresh content, are still grappling with mounting cash-flow pressures and rising operational costs.
Yet amid the turbulence, the region’s most senior agency leaders insist that what is happening is not a collapse. Nor, they argue, is it merely a temporary downturn waiting for a return to old patterns. Instead, they see MENA entering a new phase altogether — leaner, more technologically driven, more culturally intelligent, and ultimately more resilient than before.
The industry’s leaders repeatedly return to the same idea: this is not a recovery. It is a reset.
And if there is one defining characteristic of MENA’s advertising business today, it is speed — the ability to adapt rapidly under pressure, recalibrate strategies in real time, and continue building even in the middle of uncertainty.
According to multiple industry executives, the regional advertising market — estimated at $11 billion with figures ranging between $9 billion and $12 billion depending on methodology — could contract by anywhere between 15 percent and 30 percent this year. The impact, however, has not been evenly distributed.
Saudi Arabia remains comparatively stable, supported by strong domestic demand and government-backed transformation agendas. The UAE, meanwhile, presents a more divided picture. Abu Dhabi’s economy remains relatively protected by government spending, while Dubai — heavily dependent on tourism, retail activity, and transient populations — has felt sharper pressure.
Elsewhere, markets such as Kuwait and Bahrain are struggling significantly, while Qatar has shown signs of partial recovery despite demographic and economic shifts.
Still, few executives interviewed for this story sounded defeated. If anything, many argued that adversity has accelerated long-overdue change.
From survival to reinvention
Among the clearest voices articulating that transformation is Nassib Boueri, CEO MENA, VML & WPP RHQ, who believes the region’s growth story is now being driven by reinvention rather than survival.
“Recovery in MENA’s advertising and marketing industry is increasingly defined by resilience, reinvention, and renewed ambition,” Boueri says. “Despite ongoing geopolitical tensions and economic pressure across parts of the region, the industry has continued to evolve, innovate, and attract investment at a remarkable pace.”
For Boueri, the region’s next phase is being shaped by “agility, efficiency, and relevance,” with brands increasingly prioritizing measurable impact, creator-led ecosystems, commerce-driven marketing, and AI-enabled production models.
“The clearest signal of the region’s next growth phase is the confidence to keep building despite uncertainty,” he says. “Markets such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE continue to drive transformation through major investments in entertainment, tourism, technology, and infrastructure.”
He also believes the nature of creativity itself is changing across MENA.
“One of the clearest reflections of MENA’s resilience translating into both creative and commercial strength has been the region’s broader shift toward culturally rooted, platform-native storytelling rather than traditional large-scale advertising alone,” Boueri says.
According to him, many of the region’s most effective campaigns recently were not the biggest in scale, but the most authentic and culturally nuanced.
“Brands increasingly leaned into Arabic-first content, creator-led ecosystems, social commerce, gaming, entertainment partnerships, and real-time cultural engagement to remain relevant in a fast-moving and emotionally sensitive environment.”
That emphasis on cultural intelligence over pure scale is echoed by Tarek Miknas, CEO FP7 McCann MENAT, who argues that the region has learned to operate through complexity rather than wait for stability.
“Recovery in MENA doesn’t look like a return to ‘normal.’ It looks like a region that has learned how to operate through complexity — and still build momentum,” Miknas says.
“In the GCC, brands are being held to a higher standard: patriotic yet brand-focused, respectful of the moment yet offering optimism, visible but never opportunistic, fast but never at the expense of judgment.”
Miknas says brands are increasingly rewarded for balance and emotional intelligence rather than aggressive visibility.
“Our GCC Consumer Confidence Monitoring has been clear: moments like these don’t call for silence or overreaction. They call for balance.”
The next stage of growth, he argues, will be defined by smarter integration and more meaningful utility.
“The strategic shift that best captures the region’s direction is the move from message-led resilience to utility-led resilience: brands doing something tangible, not just saying the right thing,” he says.
For Miknas, the future belongs to ideas that create genuine value within people’s daily lives rather than simply generating awareness.
Brands enter the utility era
That idea of utility over interruption also resonates strongly with Saleh Ghazal, CEO OMD MENA.
“Recovery is the wrong word because it implies we’re returning to something familiar. We’re not,” Ghazal says. “This region has learned how to operate through constant change, whether that’s economic shifts, geopolitical uncertainty or evolving consumer behaviour. That resilience is now translating into smarter growth.”
According to Ghazal, the clearest evidence of long-term confidence is that brands are once again investing beyond short-term performance metrics.
“We’re seeing bigger commitments to data, commerce, AI and cultural partnerships,” he says. “Saudi’s transformation, the UAE’s innovation agenda and Qatar’s digital acceleration are all fuelling that momentum.”
But Ghazal argues the deeper transformation is philosophical.
“For me, it’s less about one campaign and more about a strategic shift — brands are moving from interruption to participation. That’s where the real growth is happening.”
He believes the strongest brands in MENA are no longer trying to dominate culture from the outside. Instead, they are embedding themselves into the communities, creator spaces, gaming ecosystems, and live experiences where audiences already spend their time.
“That shift has created both creative and commercial upside because it’s built on relevance, not just reach,” Ghazal says.
Why agencies still see growth ahead
Among the region’s most senior media executives, Mazen Jawad, CEO Horizon Holdings, frames the current crisis within a much longer regional history.
“Over the past three decades, our region has faced repeated ‘black swan’ events, from major economic shocks to political conflicts, each placing immense pressure on economies and disrupting growth,” Jawad says.
“Every crisis forced governments, businesses, and industry leaders to act quickly, balancing immediate mitigation efforts with preparations for recovery. And despite varying timelines and outcomes, recovery always followed.”
Jawad says the GCC’s economic diversification strategies have strengthened the advertising sector’s long-term resilience.
“The GCC countries have reinforced their position as regional and global business hubs through diversification, investment and long-term vision,” he says.
At the same time, he acknowledges the uneven impact across industries, particularly sectors dependent on tourism and transit activity.
“Many successfully mitigated part of the impact by rapidly shifting their focus, messaging and media investments toward local communities and domestic demand,” Jawad explains.
For Nadim Ghrayeb, CEO of Leo Gulf, what the industry is witnessing is “a structural reset toward higher-quality growth.”
“Recovery in MENA is not a cyclical rebound,” Ghrayeb says. “What we see across the region is greater confidence in marketing as a driver of business transformation.”
According to him, the strongest signal of the next growth phase is that clients are no longer merely restoring budgets. They are building capabilities.
“Clients are moving beyond budget recovery to capability building: first-party data, AI-enabled decisioning, smarter content ecosystems, and integrated models that connect brand building with measurable business outcomes.”
Ghrayeb believes commerce-led ecosystems will define the future of MENA marketing.
“Brands are no longer looking for isolated campaigns, but connected solutions that build relevance, accelerate demand, and deliver measurable outcomes across the full consumer journey.”
Commerce drives recovery
Beyond the holding groups, independent agencies also see the crisis accelerating structural change.
Samer Majzoub, Regional Managing Director at Mindshare, argues that pressure has forced agencies to become sharper and more commercially disciplined.
“The honest answer is that recovery looks nothing like what we expected, it looks better,” Majzoub says.
“The conflict forced a level of strategic discipline on brands and agencies alike that years of comfortable growth never could.”
He points specifically to ecommerce and lower-funnel commerce strategies as one of the biggest accelerators of change.
“What started as a way to compensate for physical retail losses has become a core growth strategy,” he says.
Majzoub believes accountability is now fundamentally reshaping creative and media operations.
“ROI isn’t a metric at the end of the process, it’s the starting point,” he says. “That’s changed how we plan, how we buy, and how we think about the value we’re actually delivering.”
Ghassan Kassabji, CEO Impact BBDO Group Dubai and Chief Growth Officer Impact BBDO Group MENA, offers perhaps the most cautious assessment of the current market.
“Recovery will vary significantly country by country and sector by sector,” Kassabji says. “Anyone claiming the region has already turned the corner is reading a different set of signals than I am.”
He points to a clear sequence in how the downturn unfolded.
“Events and experiential businesses were hit first, media buying followed, and creative agencies have felt it to a lesser extent,” he explains.
Still, Kassabji says there is one important indicator agencies are watching carefully.
“Many clients are already planning for a Q4 recovery rather than pulling back entirely,” he says. “That planning activity is the most honest signal available right now.”
Kassabji also offers one of the most striking examples of resilience translating into emotional brand power — not through advertising, but through collective public sentiment.
“When the security situation escalated, and parts of the foreign media began questioning the UAE’s stability, what followed was an organic, unrehearsed wave of solidarity from millions of residents across more than 200 nationalities,” he says.
“A single post reading ‘I Stand With UAE’ reached 1.8 million views within hours. No brief produced it, and no agency orchestrated it.”
For Kassabji, that spontaneous emotional response revealed something deeper about the region’s identity and future.
“For our industry, that is the most compelling proof point for long-term brand building we have seen in years.”
Financial caution, however, still dominates much of the market.
Ralph Khoury, CFO MENA and WPP Media, says agencies are watching for what economists describe as “green shoots.”
“Typical lead indicators in the market would be an increase in new pitches, client engagements, and follow-up enquiries,” Khoury says. “Accelerated buying decisions and new investment decisions being made.”
But he notes that companies are increasingly focusing on internal resilience rather than external uncertainty.
“The businesses making headway right now are those focusing on what they do control: their talent, their product availability, their processes, building new capabilities, and maintaining key stakeholder relationships.”
Nick Walsh, Founder and CEO, Migrate and Founder Alliance of Independent Agencies Middle East, believes client expectations themselves have fundamentally shifted.
“Recovery in MENA isn’t a rebound to how the industry operated five years ago,” Walsh says. “It’s the emergence of a very different market.”
According to him, brands are increasingly moving away from rigid agency structures toward specialist, agile partnerships.
“Clients are under pressure to move quicker, operate leaner and connect more authentically with culture,” he says.
Walsh believes the rise of independent alliances reflects where the region is heading creatively and commercially.
“MENA agencies are no longer trying to imitate global standards; they’re helping redefine them.”
Meanwhile, Mario Soufia, Regional Managing Director, WPP Media – Strategy, Growth and Marketing says the region’s strongest signals are structural rather than cyclical. “Recovery in MENA today is more like acceleration than rebound,” Soufia says.
He points to rapid growth in retail media, creator economies, digital commerce, and AI-led transformation across Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
“What is especially exciting is that MENA is no longer simply following global marketing trends, it is shaping them,” he says.
Soufia believes the defining strategic shift has been the rise of adaptive, always-on marketing ecosystems.
“Rather than pulling back during uncertainty, many brands doubled down on agility, shifting budgets faster, leaning into creators, retail media and AI-powered personalization.”
For Patrick Samaha, Founder of Eleveight, Shareholder at NextAudio, GulfBuzz, Financial Freedom Today, BRAME, resilience begins internally before it can appear externally.
“Companies today need to become resilient as a business first, because you can’t operate on a model where, if something happens, you are unable to sustain yourself,” Samaha says.
He argues that accountability and crisis ownership have become central operational questions for agencies navigating instability.
At the same time, Samaha believes media consumption habits are undergoing a major transformation, particularly toward audio and podcast ecosystems.
“I believe audio is becoming more trusted as people want to hear from voices they trust rather than highly paid or produced commercials,” he says.
“If a podcaster I trust is talking about a brand or product, I’m far more likely to listen to and consume that content.”
Finally, Marc Ghosn, CEO MENA at Wavemaker, says clients are no longer treating uncertainty as a reason to retreat.
“Brands learnt their lessons from Covid, recognizing cutting budgets will leave them behind their competitors,” Ghosn says.
Instead, he says brands are reallocating investment to match rapidly evolving consumer behavior.
“Consumers are more prepared and adjusted to their plans changing at a minute’s notice,” he says.
According to Ghosn, AI and commerce are accelerating that transformation even further.
“Strategies have been influenced by continual shifts in consumer behavior,” he says. “A key shift has been in commerce.”
The new rules of MENA marketing
Taken together, the interviews reveal an industry under extraordinary pressure — but also one convinced that the future will belong to agencies and brands capable of moving faster, integrating deeper, and operating with greater cultural precision than ever before.
Across virtually every conversation, the same themes emerged repeatedly: AI, commerce, creator ecosystems, cultural intelligence, platform-native storytelling, and operational agility.
Yet perhaps the most important theme was psychological rather than technological.
Despite layoffs, shrinking budgets, delayed spending, visa challenges, and broader economic uncertainty, the region’s agencies still believe MENA’s next major growth phase is coming.
Not because conditions are easy.
But because the industry believes it has already survived enough disruption to know how to build through it.
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