Marketing is a cost. The media investment, the team behind brand and performance, the tech, the digital ecosystem, the agency fees. And here in the region, that cost just got heavier to carry. After a Q1 and Q2 that hit travel, tourism, automotive, and luxury harder than most, marketing isn’t just a growth function anymore, it’s the recovery plan. The pressure to show what it actually delivers has never been more direct. (Read The Morning After if you want the longer version.)

And this isn’t only a regional story. The same week I’m writing this, ahead of Cannes, BCG’s new CMO research put a number on it: 94% of CMOs say their CEO now expects marketing to show real impact from its AI spend. The years of buying on faith are closing.

So let me get a little nostalgic. Go back to when the thing that decided which agency won was something else entirely. Back in 2013, when programmatic was the shiny new kid on the block and the whole stack everyone was demoing felt like magic. Clients were genuinely in awe. I remember it well.

But honestly? The client didn’t pick the agency for the demo. They picked it for the leadership on the business, the talent in the room, the boldness, the ideas, and the fact that someone was willing to own the result alongside them. Nobody pulled the theatrics. The work, and the people behind it, were the pitch.

So when did capability become a product tour?

Look at what we call capability today and it’s a different thing. Capability is the product. And the product is a mash of tools, partnerships, data sets, AI workflows, audience pools, commerce APIs, AdTech, and on it goes. All of that contributes to what an agency can do. But capability was never really supposed to be about that. Growth was never a build problem. You don’t solve it by buying more technology or data, and you don’t solve it by restructuring or rebranding the function into a new operating model. After two decades doing this across the region, the conviction I keep coming back to is this: a real capability is the willingness to commit to accountability, and to build on it for growth. Everything else is equipment. And isn’t that the thing we keep circling in pitch rooms? The agency opens the deck. The CMO listens politely for three slides, then writes down the sentence that will matter to her CFO on Monday: will this thing actually grow my business? I’ve been fortunate to learn from some of the most respected client-side executives in the region. Asked that question on the side, in many instances, I couldn’t commit. What comes next is, more often than not, a tour. Logos, demos, data lakes, agentic workflows. The identity graphs are impressive when stitched into media planning, though plenty are running on the client’s own first-party data. Every credible holding group can run this tour now. When everyone owns the same engine, the engine stops being the answer. It quietly becomes the entry fee. The question stopped being do you have AI a long time ago. The harder question is whether the AI was actually built for the outcome the person across the table is on the hook for. Some agencies have built the system to deliver on “better reach” or “smarter audiences” or “media efficiency”. But where is the real incremental growth? That’s the only number a CFO buys. Marketing activity and growth are different conversations, even when they’re sold as one.

If I had to put one line on the wall, it’d be this: the platform was the easy part. Growth belongs to whoever is willing to put their name on the number.

But wasn't building the platform the hard part?

The build, honestly, is finished. The platforms are real and genuinely capable, billions committed. Three serious bets on the same idea: brand and performance, kept in separate rooms for fifteen years, finally collapse into one system once media, data, and content live in the same place. More or less everything that can be bought has been bought.

I design operating models for a living, so let me be honest about their limits. A model is just a diagram until someone owns the number it produces. The industry keeps selling the build, the platform, the reorg, because all three are fundable, demoable, and safe. They buy time. What actually turns capability into growth is the discipline of walking back ninety days later with an actual result.

Is anyone actually measuring what matters?

This isn't just a feeling. It's measurable. PwC's 2026 work on AI maturity found that organisations in Saudi Arabia are putting roughly the same budget share into AI as their global peers, around 11% against 12%. But they're getting a lower return: 30% against a global average of 37. PwC's own read is the part worth sitting with: companies are creating value through AI before they've figured out how to measure, attribute, and capture it financially. Same spend, weaker return, because deployment ran ahead of accountability.

The pressure has reached the top. Dataiku's 2026 AI Confessions report surveyed 900 chief executives, including a UAE cohort, and found the personal stakes weigh heavier on leaders here than almost anywhere else. In 2025, CEOs feared falling behind on AI. In 2026, they fear being held accountable for it. A performance mandate, not innovation and ambition. The whole shift in a sentence.

Globally, Dynatrace's 2026 study of senior leaders at companies doing $100 million or more found that fewer than half measure AI against business outcomes. The rest count uptime, productivity, prompts. Activity, dressed up as value.

And here’s the part worth noticing. Even the most credible prescription on the table stops one step short. BCG’s newest CMO research finds the frontrunners pulling ahead by redesigning the marketing operating model, rebuilding the stack around agentic orchestration rather than isolated tools, and adding what it calls a context layer, a structured map of the brand’s rules, KPIs, and operating logic that grounds AI in how the business actually works. The diagnosis is sharp: 96% of CMOs say AI is driving end-to-end transformation, yet only about a third have actually redesigned how the function operates.

Why does this hit harder here than anywhere else?

The GCC has committed to growth at a scale and speed that leaves no room for ambiguity in the marketing function. Saudi Arabia's Vision 2030 non-oil economy is at 75% of GDP. The UAE's non-oil sector hit nearly 77% in Q1 2025. Tourism, hospitality, retail, financial services, entertainment, these categories that live on brand and media are now the engine of the region's commercial story.

The media investment has followed. The platforms are at full capacity, the data is funded, the agency ecosystems are here, fully built and resourced.

Which means the marketing leader here isn't waiting for capability to arrive, it's already here. What they're sitting with is a CFO who's watched the investment scale and is now asking the question the tour never answers: what did any of this add to the business? In a market growing this fast, that question has never been louder. The gap between QBR reporting and what actually moved the P&L has never been more exposed.

So what questions should actually change the room?

If the CEO's new fear is being held accountable for AI, then the job of the marketer is to walk in holding the answer, to do that, start by asking these four questions:

What outcome am I actually buying? Incremental revenue, margin, retention, lifetime value, the things the CFO already lives by

How does your AI reach my P&L? Show me the layer that turns the platform into a commercial result. Not the platform tour again What walks into my board in ninety days? Not the pilot. The first real, measurable result

And who owns the number? The person whose job starts at the growth target and works backwards to the technology, rather than the other way round

If the answers aren't clean, then what the room got sold was infrastructure. And infrastructure isn't what the CMO came to buy for the CFO.

Who actually writes the next chapter?

Here's where we are. The media platforms are automated, some of the creative is AI-generated, also the measurement stack has never been more sophisticated. Yet the gap between what gets reported in a QBR and what actually moved the business is still wide enough to drive a truck through.

The next chapter in marketing is an accountability chapter. It belongs to the CMO who stops accepting the tour, and the marketing partner willing to stake their name on what the work actually grows.

So in your next chapter, when you bring AI into the marketing plan, will you comfortably put your name on the number that investment is supposed to produce?

Rasha Rteil is an independent executive advisor. After two decades running growth, media, MarTech, creative, and consulting mandates across MENA, spanning WPP, IPG, and most recently as Managing Director of Omnicom Consulting, she works entirely on the client's side of the table, re-engineering marketing operating models for growth.