By: Amal Alhomosany: General Manager, e& Info Services

2025’s Defining Shift: From Media Buying to Data Intelligence

If 2024 was the year AI entered marketing decks, 2025 was the year it entered billing lines — reshaping what performance means in practice. The most defining shift has been gradual move from media buying to data intelligence as the core driver of effectiveness. Marketers in MENA stopped asking only “Where should I spend?” and started asking “What signals are we using, how do we qualify, and what does incrementality look like?

Three forces accelerated this shift:

  1. Retail & commerce media acceleration — First-party purchase, search, and store-level data turned into performance products.
  2. Telco and publisher identity partnerships — Clean-room collaborations enabled privacy-compliant deterministic targeting beyond walled gardens.
  3. Agentic AI in campaign ops, collapsing manual planning cycles and exposing how much time in agencies was non-value “process work.”

The lesson from 2025 is that reach and impressions remain abundant, but trust and qualification are scarce. The brands that won didn’t just target more — they targeted right through data fusion across telecom, OTT, retail, and mobility environments. As a result, the competitive edge moved upstream into data taxonomy, identity resolution, and closed-loop measurement, not necessarily downstream into CPM discounts or creative rotation.

2026 Prediction: The Market Will Reward Deterministic Accountability

2026 will be the year media stops being bought and starts being verified. The major shift underway is the industry’s move away from proxy performance toward deterministic accountability — knowing who you reached, what they did, and whether the outcome mattered commercially.

Three forces will define this break from legacy performance logic:

  1. Identity becomes the new inventory
    With cookies collapsing and probabilistic targeting losing credibility, advertisers will demand deterministic audiences and authenticated reach. Telco, retail, and mobility data will form the new cross-domain identity fabric.
  2. Clean rooms become utilities, not walled silos
    Enterprise advertisers will require identity resolution, match rates, and incrementality measurement across media owners. That forces interoperability across clean rooms, retailers, and publishers, not just within walled gardens.
  3. Outcome language becomes commercial, not media-led
    CFOs and CMOs will converge around validated indicators like ROAS, LTV, new-to-brand, and new-to-category — replacing legacy proxies such as CPM, CTR, reach, or viewability.


Why MENA Will Shape This First

The region is structurally set up to lead this evolution — as it is less fragmented and more regularized.

-Integrated telco ecosystems

-Dense retail and payments infrastructure

-High mobile-first commerce behavior

-Many loyalty programs and OTT platforms with a signed in userbase

-Governments that legislate at the speed of markets, not beyond them

This creates a unique opportunity for MENA to become the first commercial testbed for identity-led, privacy-safe, deterministic media. An integrated spine will move from a theoretical future to live and operational solutions.

The global story will be written in many places, but the first real proof points — the ones that show how identity, attention, and outcomes converge into a new economic layer — are likely to emerge from MENA.

This is not just a change but whole shift that won’t just reshape advertising — it will reshape how digital economies are valued.