Navigating the MENA media landscape requires moving beyond surface-level platform metrics and anchoring strategy in real commercial impact. Below, we explore the shift toward AI-driven planning, the necessity of balancing brand and performance, and the unique regional realities shaping media buying today. Guiding us through these insights is Daria Rudzka, Head of Paid Media at Incubeta MENA, who leads digital performance across the MENA region. Bringing 15 years of experience driving growth for global brands, Daria leads a cross-functional team across data, creative, and platform execution, focusing on turning media strategy into measurable business outcomes.
When brands in MENA look for a media agency, what are they usually trying to improve?
Most come in with one of three problems: they’re spending but can’t prove it’s working, they’re over-indexed on bottom-funnel and starving brand growth, or they’ve lost confidence in their platforms and want someone to hold them accountable. ROI and transparency are the loudest asks, but the underlying issue is usually a measurement gap, not a media gap.
How has media planning changed in the region over the past year?
AI-driven buying has moved so much of the execution to the platforms that the real planning work now happens upstream, in audience architecture and creative strategy.
Performance expectations have also intensified. CMOs and boards want commercial outcomes attached to every line of spend, and the tolerance for awareness as a standalone objective is shrinking. The measurement capability exists – GA4, clean room solutions, multi-touch frameworks – but most clients haven’t got the basics properly set up yet.
WhatsApp is less a trend and more a reality check for anyone planning performance media here. Penetration is among the highest globally, and click-to-WhatsApp as a conversion pathway is growing fast, particularly in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the UAE, where it’s how people actually communicate and transact. Any performance plan that ignores it is ignoring how the audience behaves.
What makes media buying and planning in MENA unique?
Every market in MENA operates differently. Different platform dominance, different content consumption, different purchase behaviors, and radically different price dynamics. You can’t run a single regional plan and call it MENA.
And within each market, the expat versus local dynamic adds another layer. In the UAE especially, expats are the majority, and the two audiences behave differently across platforms, content, language, and how they make purchase decisions.
Ramadan changes everything. Consumer behavior, content consumption, and purchase patterns all shift. This requires a full media environment reset and dedicated planning.
How do you balance brand-building and performance media for clients?
The honest answer is most clients are underweight on brand because performance media shows results faster, and that’s what gets prioritized. But performance media only captures demand that already exists. Brand media creates it. So when performance starts declining, the instinct is to optimize harder, when often the real problem is that the top of the funnel has been neglected for too long.
In terms of how we actually balance it, it depends on the client, their category, and the market maturity. Rather than starting with a preset budget split, we look at what the data is already telling us. If branded search is flat while performance spend is growing, that’s a signal. If cost per acquisition is creeping up with no media mix change, same diagnosis. The data tells you where the imbalance is before the client feels it commercially.
The way we think about it, brand and performance aren’t separate budget lines; they’re a sequence. Brand media creates the conditions for performance media to work efficiently. When you run them in silos with separate teams and separate KPIs, you get a fragmented customer journey and inflated acquisition costs.
What role does data play in improving media performance?
The reality across the industry is that every media decision gets made with or without data. The difference shows up in performance.
Budget allocation based on assumptions rather than evidence means money sits in the wrong channels for too long. Audiences built on platform defaults rather than CRM data or real audience profiling mean you’re reaching the right demographic but the wrong people. And measurement that stops at clicks means you never actually know if the media worked commercially.
Where data is embedded in the planning process, from audience building through to budget decisions and forecasting expected returns, performance improves because the decisions are better.
What is one misconception clients have about paid media today?
The biggest misconception is that paid media is a short-term lever. Brief the agency Monday, see results by Friday. That’s not how it works, and chasing that timeline usually means optimizing for the metrics that move fastest – clicks, CPMs, cost per result – rather than the ones that actually matter commercially.
Connected to that is the assumption that cheaper means better. A low CPM looks efficient on a dashboard, but if it’s reaching the wrong audience, it’s just cheap waste.
Then there’s the over-reliance on performance at the expense of brand. Clients who cut brand investment to fund more performance spend eventually hit a ceiling where acquisition costs keep rising and they can’t understand why. The demand that performance media harvests has to be created somewhere.
And automation doesn’t solve any of this. Platforms will spend your budget efficiently. What they won’t do is tell you if the strategy is wrong.
How does the media team collaborate with creative and MI to drive better results?
Media, creative, and MI work together from the start of a project, under one roof. That matters because most agencies separate these disciplines, which means insights travel slowly, feedback loops are delayed, and by the time data influences creative, the campaign has already run.
At Incubeta, audience insights, search behavior, and performance data inform the creative strategy before anything goes into production. We work from shared briefs, meet continuously throughout campaigns, and when something isn’t working, the conversation happens in the same room, not across emails between separate agencies.
MI connects everything to actual business outcomes, keeping budget allocation, planning, and creative all reading from the same data.
What media trends should MENA brands prepare for?
AI-driven buying is only going to accelerate. Platforms will automate more of the execution, and brands that haven’t figured out how to feed them good signals – clean data, strong creative, clear audience logic – will get efficient delivery of the wrong message. The strategic layer above automation becomes more important, not less.
WhatsApp needs to move from experimental to planned. Click-to-WhatsApp is already growing as a conversion pathway, but most brands are still treating it as a test. In 2026, it needs its own budget and its own measurement thinking.
First-party data is the one where most brands are already behind without realizing it. We’re seeing some clients start to build it out, but very few are actually activating it for advertising. Manual connections, no automation, and data sitting in a CRM that never talks to media planning. Most brands haven’t activated what they already have.
Connected TV is real in this region now. We’re buying inventory through Shahid, OSNTV, and InMobi. Audience behavior has moved to streaming faster than media budgets have followed.
What advice would you give to brands choosing a media agency partner in MENA?
The most common mistake brands make when choosing a media agency in this region is leading with cost. Fees matter, but the cheapest option rarely asks the right questions before spending your budget.
The things worth evaluating are harder to see in a pitch. Does the agency have a clear point of view on how your budget should be allocated and why? Can they show you a measurement framework that connects media to actual business outcomes, not just platform metrics? Do they have genuine platform expertise, or are they reselling what the platforms tell them? And do they understand this region as a collection of distinct markets, not one homogeneous block?
Transparency is also non-negotiable. You should know exactly where your money is going, how decisions are being made, and what the data is actually saying, even when it’s uncomfortable.
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