About Layal Hassi, Media Planning and Buying Manager, du

Layal is a passionate mediaholic at heart with over 11 years experience across Middle East and North Africa. Layal began her career working at one of the biggest globally recognized agencies in the industry, spanning her portfolio across FMCGs, Telco, Banking, Hospitality and QSRs, among many others. Being one of the very first hybrid online and offline media planners at the time, Layal today navigates complex business landscapes across both offline and online media.

Today, Layal leads on the media planning and buying assignment at du Telecom, where she is leveraging her experience to implement a digital first planning approach, coupled with a customer obsessed strategy, linking online and offline planning to execute strong go-to market strategies.

A continuous mediaholic at heart, Layal’s passion points lays in ensuring that the brands she has worked on and continues to work on, move their digital maturity transformation progress forward in enhancing their end-to-end journeys, strengthening the data driven marketing maturity and focusing on a holistic ecosystem that is specifically designed to cater to any audience at hand,  thus increasing brand recognition, ad-recall and essentially return on investment.  

In her spare time, Layal is a passionate owner of 2 horses and a philanthropist at heart, whose sole focus quite often remains on the welfare of others.

About her thoughts for the industry

2023 literally just started yesterday, and the truth of the matter is, Q1 is almost over. So what does this mean for brands and our industry generally? Agility, agility and more agility….

It only feels like yesterday when we first heard about the metaverse, which then very quickly transformed into the obsession with AI along simultaneous conversations happening on immersive media and blockchain and the likes of it. Sounds like a lot to absorb doesn’t it? 

I always ask our partners and peers to break this down into focused pillars, allowing us to navigate our business through the year and that quite often starts with the simple saying of “Do less rather than more and focus on the bigger picture that will create more impact”

And so this ultimately translates into:

  • AI is transcending into a media content force, which seems to be the shortcut for agile business solutions.
  • Immersive Media remains at the heart of what every brand should continue to embrace. Today’s opportunities across our region are continuously being supported by new immersive technologies.
  • Content will forever remain king: in a world where our consumers are more than ever exposed to endless minute by minute pieces of content, brands have to embrace more meaningful ways to acquire and retain customers. The expectation that ROI will continue to grow via basic display and social messaging, needs to fade out, with a key focus being the consumer and their very own interest at heart. 

This is the year for brands to be presented with a vast number of opportunities with countless products and betas being presented on a daily basis. The key is to prioritize what truly matters to the brand at heart, focus on being different and keeping up with the agile industry changes.