As budgets shift toward creators in the Gulf, the industry’s next hurdle is showing it builds new demand rather than reshuffling the old. That was the throughline at IAB MENA’s 2026 Creator Marketing Forum.
Imagine a brand with 50 customers. This month, 20 find it through Facebook and 30 through a search engine. Next month, 20 arrive via TikTok and 30 via a different search engine. The channel mix looks busier. The business hasn’t grown at all.
That scenario, sketched by Hani Hatoum, Digital Lead for Media Audience Measurement at Ipsos MENA, during the forum, that question ran through nearly every session. The creator economy has won its place in the marketing mix. What it hasn’t yet done, at scale, is prove what it adds.
The efficiency trap
Hatoum, who spoke on the forum’s measurement panel and later to Communicate, calls incrementality the most overlooked metric in the business. The trap, he said, is that brands, agencies and advertisers chase cost efficiency, and the cheapest wins usually come from harvesting demand that already exists. Creating new demand is what actually grows a brand, and it only shows up when you test for it.
His prescription is deliberate: run creators alongside social and search for a month, then switch creators off for two weeks and watch what happens to search. Much of creator marketing’s value sits in those cross-channel effects, he said, and they stay invisible unless marketers build the conditions to see them.
The stakes are internal as much as strategic. “Measurement is the ammunition in your gun,” Hatoum said. It’s what lets a marketing team walk into the CFO’s office and defend next year’s plan. “You cannot defend what isn’t measurable.”
What’s changing is the currency itself. The market used to price creators on followers; now it looks at engagement, sentiment and performance, down to sales tracked through a creator’s own discount code.
Scale alone is losing its pull. Hatoum pointed to creators with huge followings who have partnered with so many brands that any single association has worn thin. He echoed a fellow panelist’s point that brands borrow trust from creators, which is exactly what over-commercialized accounts can no longer lend.
That is already moving money. Ipsos is seeing budgets trickle from celebrity names to micro- and nano-creators with smaller, more engaged audiences. “Authenticity doesn’t always mean big,” he said.
The catch is that this kind of measurement remains a luxury. Robust incrementality testing needs a large enough sample size, which many advertisers simply don’t have. Ipsos research shows the creator economy growing rapidly, Hatoum said, with a new wave of companies building the tools and infrastructure the sector needs to scale.
Local nuance adds another layer. Each GCC market behaves differently, he said, and understanding those differences is what keeps brands relevant. To matter, brands have to understand their audiences; to understand them, they have to listen.
Hatoum joined Anthony Nghayoui, Head of Creo, OMG, Karim Zouein, MENA Creator Lead and Manoshi Bhattacharjee, Manoshi Bhattacharjee is a Product Go-to-Market Lead at Amazon Ads, on “Proving the Value: Measuring What Matters in Creator Marketing.”
There were different throughout the day but the same conclusion: creator marketing’s next phase will be won by those who can show their work.
