Yet the commercial task facing many brands and agencies is increasingly difficult to avoid: restore momentum, rebuild demand, and create a stronger base for growth.
The industry may prefer a different language for the moment, but the business challenge still requires a recovery plan.
The preferred language is more transformational: rewiring, reinvention, resilience, and acceleration. The logic is understandable. Recovery can sound like a return to the old operating model when the market, the consumer, and the technology landscape have all moved on.
But there is a risk in becoming too sophisticated about the language.
Recovery does not mean that those who have identified a different need are going backwards. It can simply mean restoring commercial momentum after a shock, then rebuilding from a stronger base.
That distinction matters now because many client-agency relationships are carrying a commercial mismatch. Media budgets have been frozen, deferred, or reduced in parts of the market, while expectations around demand, sales, market share, and service have always been the ones that undergo a different reset at the same pace.
There is no single public regional dataset that quantifies the scale of those budget freezes, so this should not be presented as a market-wide statistic. But as a commercial pattern, it raises a very practical question for both sides of the table:
Can we continue asking marketing to produce the original growth plan from a materially different investment base?
The latest evidence does not support a simplistic story of either collapse or rebound.
Ipsos’ July 2026 Global Consumer Confidence Index rose for a third consecutive month to 49.0, with all four sub-indices improving. In Saudi Arabia, the July Primary Consumer Sentiment Index stood at 70.2, keeping the Kingdom among the more optimistic markets measured by Ipsos. Consumers remained broadly positive about their future personal finances and the economic outlook, as well as their ability to make major purchases and invest for the future. Employment remained the main area of caution.
The spending data tells a similarly mixed but useful story. NielsenIQ’s State of the Nation reporting put the combined consumer basket across the UAE and Saudi Arabia at $56.2 billion in Q1 2026, with aggregate FMCG sales up 7.3%. But the markets are not moving in one direction. Saudi FMCG spending declined 1.1%, while technology and durables grew 6%. Across the two markets, both premium and value propositions continued to grow. The implication for marketers is more important than the headline number.
Consumers have not stopped spending. They are reallocating, comparing harder, and making sharper choices about value.
That is a very different problem from disappearing demand. And it is precisely why indiscriminate marketing cuts can become strategically expensive. When consumers are more selective, brands need better decisions about where demand still exists, what proposition can unlock it, which audiences are moving, and which channels can convert it economically. Recovery, therefore, cannot be managed as a waiting exercise.
When investment falls but expected outcomes remain intact, agencies are usually pushed toward one of two responses.
The first is to absorb the difference: maintain scope, maintain service, and hope to spend returns later. That protects the client relationship in the short term but can erode the agency economics required to fund senior talent, data, technology, measurement, and specialist capability.
The second option is to reduce the scope of services until the financial situation improves. That may protect the agency P&L, but it can also reduce exactly the capability the client needs to navigate a difficult market.
Neither is a particularly strong recovery strategy. The better option is to redesign the commercial relationship around the reality both parties are now operating in.
That means agencies need to become more confident about owning recovery as a business problem, not merely defending the cost of media or the cost of services.
It also means clients need to stop treating the January plan as economically intact if the investment assumptions underneath it have changed.
Gain-share becomes useful here, but only if it is structured with more intelligence than a generic performance bonus.
If the market has been disrupted and the investment base has changed, jumping straight to an incremental-growth promise is not credible for either side. Before anyone debates what additional growth an agency should be paid to create, both parties need to agree on what recovery actually means for the business, and which indicators will honestly measure it. That agreement sits above the media plan and above the campaign brief. It is a commercial question, and one that most current relationships have never properly asked.
Gain-share that survives this pressure recognises the full system a business runs on, and the operating conditions required to influence it. Gain-share written as a media-only construct on the back of a scope document does not.
An agency asked to share risk needs the room to shape the outcome. A client asking an agency to share risk needs to be honest about how much of that outcome the agency can actually reach. These conditions belong at the start of a contract, and rarely appear there.
AI now needs to sit inside this conversation, but in the right place.
It should not be used as the argument that marketing can simply produce the same result for less money. That risks turning AI into another cost-cutting mechanism before the operating model is ready to capture its value.
The more useful role for AI is as an acceleration layer across the recovery system. That matters enormously in a recovery environment.
Is AI a multiplier? Is it multiplying the quality of the operating system underneath it?
McKinsey’s June 2026 research on AI in marketing makes the distinction clearly. While 90% of CMOs surveyed were experimenting with AI use cases, fewer than 10% had scaled AI and captured value across marketing workflows. Only 28% were pursuing a more fundamental rewiring of teams and workflows. The opportunity is not another isolated AI tool. It is connecting insight, creative development, personalization, commerce, media optimization, and orchestration into a faster decision system.
AI can help marketing teams detect demand shifts faster, model audiences and scenarios, generate and test more creative variants, optimize media more dynamically, improve personalization, accelerate reporting, and identify where spending should move before a monthly or quarterly planning cycle catches up.
Is AI a multiplier? Is it multiplying the quality of the operating system underneath it?
Weak data, unclear decision rights, disconnected technology, poor measurement, and slow approvals do not become a growth engine because an AI layer has been added on top.
So the question for 2026 should not be, “How much cost can AI remove from marketing?”
It should be, “Where can AI increase the speed and quality of the decisions required to recover?”
1. Rebase the marketing economics before resetting the growth ambition.
Start with the business, not the marketing and media spend. Define what changed versus the original 2026 assumptions: demand, distribution, pricing, margin, consumer confidence, competitive activity, media inflation, conversion, customer acquisition economics, and available investment.
Then establish a revised recovery baseline and separate three things that are often collapsed into one number: protecting the existing business, restoring lost momentum, and generating incremental growth.
They have different objectives and should carry different investment assumptions.
2. Re-engineer the marketing spend and partner model around recovery.
Do not simply apply the same percentage cut across media, agencies, technology, and content.
Rebuild the investment architecture around the jobs that matter most to recovery. Protect the capabilities that improve demand visibility, customer conversion, measurement, and decision speed. Reallocate away from activity that cannot demonstrate a role in the recovery path.
At the same time, rework agency remuneration. Fund core capability properly, create a measurable recovery incentive, and move to incremental gain-share only after the recovery threshold has been achieved.
This gives both sides a commercial reason to make the new model work.
3. Build AI into the operating model, not the innovation budget.
Prioritize a small number of AI-enabled workflows where faster or better decisions can materially improve recovery: audience and demand intelligence, scenario planning, creative testing, media optimization, customer journey orchestration, and performance measurement.
Then connect the data, governance, people, and technology required to scale them. The objective is not to show that marketing is using AI. It is to shorten the distance between a market signal and a commercial response.
Agencies should not be timid about recovery: they should own it with clients, show how demand can be rebuilt, direct investment, use technology and AI for faster execution, and tie part of their economics to the result.
But brands have an equal responsibility: They cannot reduce the marketing investment base and continue carrying the same growth expectation forward unchanged. Marketing leaders need to re-engineer spend, scope, agency models, data, technology, and decision-making around what recovery now requires.
For a time, such a strategy may necessitate a conscious retreat from the concept of incremental growth.
First restore the engine. Establish the new baseline. Rebuild demand and performance. Then price the upside once the business is genuinely creating value above it.
I am not advising to lower your business ambition; I am advising towards considering a practical framework for achieving that ambition.
The strongest agency-client relationships in this cycle will not be the ones that found a better word than recovery. They will be the ones that agree on how to fund, measure, accelerate, and share the value when it arrives.
If your marketing operating model, your recovery measurement, or the commercial terms of your agency relationships are not fit for the business you are actually running in 2026, connect with me, and let’s design an operating model that turns recovery from a promise into a shared, measurable outcome.
More information on The Growth Blueprint.