Ahead of MMA MENA’s conference this week, Linda Kender, MENA Regional Director at Marketing + Media Alliance, argues that two of the industry’s biggest blind spots, how we value influence and how AI understands our region, come down to the same question: do we really understand what we’re measuring, and who we’re speaking to?
Ask a marketer in the region how their influencer budget performed last quarter and you’ll probably get a reach figure, maybe an engagement rate. Ask what it did for the business, and the answer tends to get vaguer.
That gap is one of two problems MMA MENA will put on the table at its conference on Tuesday, November 17. The other concerns AI, and whether the tools brands are rushing to adopt actually understand the people of this region. Kender, MMA’s MENA Regional Director, is leading both conversations.
Measuring influence properly
Influencer marketing left the test budget a long time ago. For many brands here it is now a sizeable share of the mix. Yet follower counts, engagement rates and creator fees still mean different things depending on who’s reading them, which makes it hard to compare one campaign with another, let alone defend the spend in front of a CFO.
MMA MENA’s Influencer Marketing Committee has been working on a fix. Its new Influencer Marketing Guide, presented on stage at the event, lays out a consistent way to value creators, measure performance and judge whether a campaign worked. A framework called Track the Power sits at its core, and the guide also deals with regional benchmarks, pricing and compliance.
Kender’s ask of marketers is direct. They should “stop treating influencer marketing as an isolated activity” and handle it like any other business investment: agree objectives before a campaign starts, know what each creator actually brings, and connect the work to brand and commercial results.
What she is after, ultimately, is “a common language for effectiveness” that brands, agencies and creators can all work from.
AI that speaks the region’s language
On AI, Kender’s worry is a quieter assumption: that a smarter model is automatically a more culturally aware one.
In MENA, that rarely holds. The region has its own languages, a wide spread of dialects and consumer habits that shift from one market to the next. What lands with an audience in Saudi Arabia can miss entirely in the UAE, Egypt or Morocco. Global models dropped in without adaptation tend to overlook those differences.
MMA MENA’s Arabic-first AI session is built around that problem. Kender wants the region to have a hand in how these tools are shaped, instead of “simply consuming technology developed elsewhere.”
The part machines can’t do
She is realistic about where this is going. Much of the execution, analysis and optimisation that fills a marketer’s week will move to machines. Judgement, context and creative instinct won’t, and she expects them to count for more once the rest is automated.
“The future isn’t about choosing between artificial intelligence and human intelligence,” she says. “It’s about knowing where each creates the greatest value.”
The rest of the day picks up similar threads. The opening panel asks what turns a company that uses AI into a genuinely intelligent marketing organisation. Later sessions look at protecting brand heritage through rapid change, the state of retail media in the UAE, the shift from programmatic to agentic buying, and how brands get recommended once people start asking AI rather than searching.
Kender’s bet is that the leaders of the next few years won’t be whoever moves to AI first. They’ll be the ones who pair it with a real understanding of their audience.
On the Agenda
Other speakers on the day include Manaswita Singh, Chief Commercial Officer, Middle East, Africa & Turkey at Kantar, on how AI is redefining insight; Melis Ertem, MEA & DACH CEO at Marketing + Media Alliance, who moderates a panel on evolving brands without erasing their heritage; Mariagrazia De Angelis, General Manager at Landor, on the same panel; Tim Buckler, Vice President, Commercialization, Customer Acquisition & Engagement, EEMEA at Mastercard, on where retail media is heading in the UAE; and Moadh Bukhash, Group Chief Executive Officer of Bukhash Brothers, who joins Kender for the Arabic-first AI conversation.
Join the conversation this week. MMA MENA’s conference takes place on Tuesday, November 17. It brings together leaders from brands, agencies, platforms and research, and features the launch of the MMA Influencer Marketing Guide and a dedicated session on Arabic-first AI. (Communicate is the event’s media partner. More about the event HERE).
