At Precision Media’s first Retail Media Summit on Monday, the group’s leaders and their biggest brand partners argued that the region’s ad money will follow proof of sales.
Majid Al Futtaim wants a bigger share of the region’s advertising budget, and it came to Dubai’s Museum of the Future with a number to frame the pitch.
“Precision Media is the next billion-dollar business for Majid Al Futtaim,” Ahmed Galal Ismail, CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Holding, told more than 200 marketers, brand leads and agency heads at Precision Media’s inaugural Retail Media Summit on Monday.
Ismail put MENA’s annual advertising spend at $8 billion and went straight to marketing’s oldest complaint, that half of it is wasted. “So perhaps today we finally found an answer to the 50% that is wasted, the $4 billion,” he said.
He described Precision Media as the group’s first AI-native business. It is built on connecting the group’s physical destinations with its retail, loyalty and e-commerce platforms. For advertisers, he said, that means “moving beyond simply buying reach or impressions towards really understanding measurable outcomes of growth and impact.”
The scale behind the pitch
At the summit, themed “The Architecture of Growth,” the numbers did the talking. According to the company, Precision Media draws on more than 420 Carrefour and HyperMax stores, 600 million annual store visits, 320 million digital visits and more than 14 million SHARE loyalty members. It works with over 300 brand partners across ten markets.
Sherin Yassin, COO International and MD of Retail Media at Majid Al Futtaim Retail, said the business grew 89% year over year in the first half. Until last year it was entirely UAE-based. The split is now 65% UAE and 35% international, with Qatar, Egypt and Kenya live and Saudi Arabia next. She told the room retail media should deliver half of the group’s billion-dollar ambition.
“As customer behaviour evolves and markets demand greater operational accountability, physical and digital ecosystems can no longer operate in silos. At Majid Al Futtaim, we view retail media not merely as a marketing channel, but as a foundational growth engine for the entire regional economy. Bringing together the region’s business leaders allows us to chart a new standard, one where connected intelligence, omnichannel integration, and real-world commercial impact drive sustainable growth for our partners,” Yassin said in a statement.
Her ask of brands was blunt: name the funnel problem, whether awareness, consideration or conversion, and “hold us accountable.”
A market in a hurry
Taha Benazoun, Acting VP of Retail Media, cited WARC projections putting global retail media investment above $220 billion by 2027. In MENA, he said, retail media growth reached as much as 40% last year, well ahead of the wider regional digital market.
His advice to brand partners was to flip the brief. “We don’t want conversations to start with how many banners, screens, or impressions you want to buy,” he said. A recent Mondelez campaign targeting shoppers new to the brand and new to the category paired loyalty-data audiences with on-site display and off-site social. It delivered a 52% increase in customers and an average return on spend of 9x.
On measurement, he was direct. “We’ve all seen campaign reports showing millions of impressions, thousands of clicks, and impressive engagement rates,” Benazoun said. “And those metrics really matter, but ultimately, what did it actually deliver?”
That question sits behind the summit’s headline launch, Precision Insights. It’s an AI-powered platform that links in-store media, digital channels and loyalty data to actual sales. It sits alongside viewed-impression billing, AI audiences built on more than 50 shopper signals and Shoppable Ads with closed-loop attribution.
The app as media owner
Arun Mohan, Chief Digital Officer at Majid Al Futtaim Retail, pitched the Carrefour app as prime inventory. “Quick Commerce is compounding at 32% year on year and is now the single largest contributing element to our overall e-commerce growth. And we’re operating at scale. We’re operating across 14 markets and we’re shipping over a million items every single day,” he said.
What brands want
Akshay Singh, Head of Product, Retail Media at Precision Media, moderated the panel “What does success in retail media really look like?” The advertisers kept coming back to speed and planning discipline.
Anurudh Sharma, Head of eCommerce MEA at Perfetti Van Melle, maker of Mentos and Chupa Chups, warned that the shopper journey is shifting under brands’ feet. “Every app out there is introducing an AI assistant,” he said. “What was relevant as an asset even one month previously is not going to be the same moving forward.”
Banah Nassar, Head of Quick Commerce Acceleration MEA at Mars, traced the Galaxy Kunafa launch to the viral Dubai chocolate trend, which grew to account for 20% of chocolate sales. Her advice to marketers: “always save buffer budget so you can always test and learn.”
Dean Weaving, Chief Digital Performance Officer at Omnicom Media Group, said the industry tends to get the order wrong. “I think we often think about measurability at the end of the campaign rather than at the start,” he said.
Incrementality remains the open question. Sharma said it’s still hard to separate the effect of media from promotions or bundles. “Not all retailers are able to give us this data,” he said.
Majid Al Futtaim is betting that the retailers who can share it will win the budget.
