I recently attended the Teads Business Breakfast in Dubai, where Robert Willock from Economist Enterprise presented the region’s recovery outlook. After months of uncertainty, I left feeling optimistic—and thinking about how quickly marketing needs to prepare.

The agency is driving its own transformation. Unsurprisingly, having been an agency lead myself and a client before to an agency, today, some marketer clients are merely passengers on a ride to Charlie’s Chocolate Factory, and nobody has explained what happens at the end.

What’s your golden rule?

Say the true thing, especially when it costs you something. The rule has four parts. Say it early. Say it plainly. Say it to the person’s face. Then stay in the room and help fix it. The staying is the part most people skip, and it is the only part that makes the honesty worth anything. Honesty and grit belong in the same sentence rather than in separate columns.

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.

There is no season in Riyadh quite like winter. There is a calm in the air, a sense that everyone is working toward something that will outlast them.

I was there for a two-day performance review on a luxury residential development within one of the Kingdom’s giga-projects, branded by one of the world’s most recognized off-plan hospitality names.

AI has become the new marketing agency demo: platforms, workflows, data layers, automation, content engines and product tours. But capability is no longer the question. The harder question is whether any of it is accountable to growth.

This article challenges marketing leaders to look past the theatre of AI adoption and ask what reaches the P&L, improves commercial return, and creates value the business can actually measure.

This piece tackle the the structural operating model decisions GCC brands must take during the recovery window, and why treating a commercial reset as a campaign question produces the wrong answer. The brands that emerge from the current period with structural advantage will not be those that spent more.

Read more to learn how businesses can use media campaigns pauses to know more about their customers and their business.

As the industry reflects on International Women’s Day, the conversation around inclusion often centers on representation.

But in the Middle East, the bigger story is economic. Women represent one of the fastest-growing forces shaping the region’s workforce and consumer economy. For brands, closing the leadership gap is not simply a question of inclusion; it is a growth strategy,

The specialized “digital team” model is obsolete, and it’s costing agencies and their clients real performance.

This article argues that treating digital as a separate discipline made sense in the early 2000s, when brands were just entering the digital space. It no longer does. Consumers across the MENA region don’t distinguish between digital and traditional channels — they navigate both fluidly, simultaneously, and on their own terms.