With continued growth in data-driven advertising, identity remains one of the key challenges across the programmatic ecosystem in the region. While there is currently no single backbone in terms of identity in MENA, insights from more mature markets could help inform how identity frameworks develop across the region.
Everyone in the room has something valuable to say. But if buyers, publishers, and data owners are each speaking a different language, the conversation never happens.
That is exactly where MENA’s programmatic ecosystem finds itself when it comes to identity.
Think of it like a loyalty card at a supermarket. Every swipe builds a more precise picture of who you are and what you need. Without it, the retailer is guessing. Digital advertising works the same way, except the challenge is even greater. Every screen identifies you differently. On mobile, you are a MAID, on desktop, you are a cookie, and on CTV, you are one of a fragmented mess of identifiers that don’t talk to each other. Without a unified identity solution, an advertiser sees ‘probably someone interested in sportswear.’ With identity, they know ‘this is someone who browsed your new collection on their phone this morning, added something to their cart on desktop at lunch, and is now watching TV at home and still hasn’t checked out.’ Which one lets you make better decisions?
The good news for MENA is that the raw ingredients are already there. Telcos collectively serve hundreds of millions of subscribers. A single major retailer logging over 770,000 customers daily, with more than 20 million loyalty members on its books. CTV platforms are building authenticated audiences at pace. The data exists at a scale most markets can only dream of. The challenge is connecting it.
A unified identity framework does exactly that, creating a single, privacy-safe identifier that travels with the user across every screen and channel. One coherent profile across all channels.
That is the promise of the open internet. And it is the opposite of what the walled gardens offer.
Every time you run a campaign inside a walled garden, you are not just buying media. You are funding a platform that is learning about your entire market on your budget. Every signal your campaign generates feeds their data pools and never comes back to you. It gets used to build smarter audiences available to every brand in your category, including your direct competitors. The more you spend, the smarter they get.
UID2 works on the opposite principle. The intelligence stays with the brand. Your CRM data is activated without leaving your control. The signals you generate enrich your own first-party understanding of your customers, which is then carried forward into the next campaign, the next channel, the next audience. The open internet, built on a shared identity framework, becomes (is) your compounding asset.
This is not theoretical. The Trade Desk’s global identity frameworks, UID2 and EUID, are an open-source, privacy-conscious identity framework that already proves the model at scale. Publishers running on UID2 have seen effective CPM uplifts of up to 116% compared to cookie-based ads. In European markets, brands are reporting up to 30 percent improvements in campaign effectiveness when campaigns are activated across all channels, under GDPR, one of the strictest data privacy regimes in the world.
For buyers, here is the uncomfortable truth: the waste is already costing you more than you know. Right now, the same person is seeing your ad multiple times across multiple publishers and you have no way of knowing. Every publisher sees them as a fresh impression. Frequency caps mean nothing across platforms. Measurement tells only part of the story because the signals never (never) joined up. Industry research suggests nearly one in five programmatic dollars is wasted this way.
A unified identity framework addresses all of this. Frequency is managed across the entire campaign. Audiences are built on real consented signals. A customer who bought last week is suppressed from acquisition and moved into retention. Someone who watched your CTV ad is followed up with a relevant DOOH message on their commute. The budget goes further with real, measurable outcomes. Publishers earn more. Data owners finally see a return on the assets they own.
Players in MENA are already moving. The building blocks are here. The exciting part is that no single player builds this alone; it only works when the whole ecosystem moves together.
