Tech Features

How the Middle East Moved Beyond Followers to Build Brands

Published

3 weeks ago

May 13, 2026

Yet another compelling new piece by Mariam Abouzeid, Marketing Manager, MEA at Nothing Technology

There is a $771 million evolution happening at the center of the Middle East marketing industry. For the past ﬁve years, the global narrative around inﬂuencer marketing was built on a ﬂawed premise that reach equals inﬂuence. Brands in New York and London debated whether the creator economy was a bubble, while marketers obsessed over vanity metrics and ﬂeeting viral moments. In the GCC, we stopped debating and started building. The inﬂuencer marketing market in the GCC is valued at $315.5 million in 2025 and is projected to reach $771.6 million by 2032. But the real story is not the money. It is the maturity.

Having overseen communications strategies that collectively generated billions of impressions across the region, I have watched Dubai and Riyadh transform from emerging markets into the global vanguard of creator led brand building.

The signals are clear. The Middle East is not catching up to the global inﬂuencer economy. We are leading it. We are doing it by fundamentally reprioritizing how creators are used, moving them out of the traditional PR umbrella and embedding them as the ultimate engine for mass awareness and deep brand trust. When you look at brands like Huda Beauty, which generates over $75 million a year through the strategic ampliﬁcation of creator content, you see the blueprint for the future. Huda Kattan built a billion dollar empire right here in Dubai not by treating inﬂuencers as a PR add on, but by embedding them into the core architecture of the brand. This creator ﬁrst model has paved the way for a new generation of Middle East beauty empires, from Youmna Khoury’s Youmi Beauty to Aliona Shcherba’s Aliona Cosmetics, proving that the region is no longer just consuming global beauty trends. It is exporting them.

The Mass Awareness Machine

Before we examine where the Middle East is going, it is worth understanding the foundation it has built. Inﬂuencers are the most powerful mass awareness engine ever created. In a region where the GCC is on track to have 263,000 active inﬂuencers in 2025, brands have access to a decentralized media network that no television buy or billboard campaign can replicate. When 60 percent of Saudi users and 48.1 percent of UAE users use social networks as their primary tool for researching brands and products, creators are not supplementing the media plan. They are the media plan. According to EMARKETER, US social network ampliﬁed content ad spending is projected to match creator sponsored content revenues at $14.15 billion in 2027 before surpassing them in 2028. Brands are about to spend more money boosting creator content than they pay

creators to make it. In the UAE and Saudi Arabia, this strategy is already taking hold. Ounass, the Middle East premier luxury e-commerce platform, provides a perfect example of this evolution. They do not just pay inﬂuencers for one oﬀ posts. They use data driven insights to identify top performing creators, then amplify that content through targeted performance marketing, blending emotional storytelling with rational product attributes to build a luxury narrative that resonates deeply with Gulf consumers and drives measurable return on ad spend/ But here is where the Middle East diverges from the global playbook. While Western brands are still treating inﬂuencers purely as awareness tools, the GCC has moved further up the value chain.

The QSR Reality Check: Awareness vs Consideration

To understand this shift, look no further than the highly competitive food and dining sector in the Middle East. This is a category where inﬂuencer marketing has been deployed more aggressively than almost any other. At the mass market end, brands like Americana operating KFC and Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Papa Johns, and Subway pour millions into inﬂuencer campaigns to stay top of mind. Yet AlBaik, the beloved Saudi homegrown champion, topped YouGov KSA QSR Rankings 2026 with a consideration score exceeding 50 percent, a position built on decades of genuine consumer love, not just inﬂuencer hype. Global giants McDonald’s and KFC follow at 26.9 percent and 23.2 percent consideration respectively, despite their enormous social media presence.

At the premium end, the contrast is even sharper. Shake Shack, Five Guys, P.F. Chang’s, Joe & The Juice, and homegrown hero SALT have all built their GCC presence on the back of creator driven content, using beautiful food photography, viral reels, and inﬂuencer queues around the block. Nobu and Zuma in Dubai have become synonymous with aspirational lifestyle content, their dining rooms perpetually ﬁlled with creators documenting every dish.

Consider the rise of % Arabica. The Kyoto born coﬀee brand has grown into a $1.3 billion global giant with virtually zero traditional marketing. In the UAE, its minimalist, highly aesthetic stores were designed speciﬁcally for the Instagram and TikTok era. The brand relies entirely on organic discovery, user generated content, and inﬂuencer footfall to drive its massive queues. It is the ultimate example of a brand built entirely on the back of social media awareness and creator aesthetics .

The stories of FIX Dessert Chocolatier and Bi Laban are perhaps the most instructive. FIX Can’t Get Knafeh of It chocolate bar became a global social media phenomenon in 2024 and 2025, generating a staggering 1,259 percent year over year explosion in social conversations. The viral awareness was undeniable, leading to $22 million in sales at

Dubai Duty Free in the ﬁrst quarter of 2025 alone 10 . But as the Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science noted, the viral fad diluted the brand identity, turning a speciﬁc product into a generic design brief copied by everyone 11 . Similarly, Bi Laban became a regional sensation engineered through inﬂuencer seeding and relentless creator buzz. The queues were real. But when the hype faded, the business fundamentals were exposed. Viral awareness, it turned out, is not a substitute for operational excellence, quality consistency, and genuine consumer loyalty.

The data reveals a stark reality. Hype does not seamlessly translate into habit. While 53 percent of Saudi residents eat fast food weekly, their ultimate choice of where to dine is driven by cleanliness at 48 percent and price at 46 percent, operational realities that no inﬂuencer can fake 12 . Inﬂuencers drive the initial discovery, cited by 61 percent of consumers as their source for ﬁnding new spots, but they are highly ineﬃcient at closing the sale 12 .

The Cost of Misalignment: When Inﬂuence Breaks Brands

If the Middle East is learning how to build brands through creators, the global market has provided the ultimate cautionary tales of what happens when inﬂuence is misaligned with brand equity. The collapse of the Adidas and Yeezy partnership remains the most expensive inﬂuencer marketing failure in history. Adidas tied its cultural relevance to a single, highly volatile creator. When the relationship imploded, Adidas posted its ﬁrst annual loss in 30 years, warning of a $1.3 billion revenue hit due to unsold inventory 13 . The lesson for regional brands is clear. Renting cultural relevance from a creator without building your own brand equity is a catastrophic ﬁnancial risk.

Similarly, Pepsi infamous Kendall Jenner campaign remains the textbook example of scripted authenticity failing spectacularly 14 . Pepsi paid a massive premium for Jenner reach, assuming her follower count would automatically translate into cultural resonance. Instead, the tone deaf execution sparked a global backlash, proving that massive awareness without genuine cultural alignment actively damages brand trust. These global failures have taught Middle East marketers a crucial lesson. Awareness without alignment is dangerous. Inﬂuence must be anchored in trust, not just reach.

The Beauty Blueprint: From Awareness to Empire

If the F&B sector illustrates the limits of viral conversion, the beauty and luxury sectors provide the blueprint for the great reprioritization. Huda Kattan built Huda Beauty into a billion dollar empire using this exact logic. She did not treat inﬂuencers as a direct sales channel. She treated them as a massive awareness engine. Today, Huda Beauty generates over $75 million a year through paid media ampliﬁcation of creator content. The brand understood early that organic inﬂuencer

posts build top of funnel awareness, but it is the paid ampliﬁcation of that content that drives actual scale.

Similarly, Mona Kattan fragrance brand Kayali has mastered this shift. Kayali does not rely on inﬂuencers to push promo codes. It uses them to build cultural relevance and awareness around scent layering. The result? According to Sephora merchant partners, Kayali now has one of the highest repurchase rates in the entire fragrance category globally 15 . The brand uses inﬂuencers to get the consumer attention, but relies on product quality and brand equity to secure the conversion and the repeat purchase.

This blueprint is now being replicated by the most powerful creators in the GCC. Kuwaiti inﬂuencer Noha Nabil leveraged her massive regional following to launch Noha Nabil Beauty, building a brand deeply rooted in Arab culture and diversity that earned her a spot on the Forbes Women Behind Middle Eastern Brands list 16 . Similarly, Emirati superstar Balqees Fathi transformed her 13 million Instagram followers into a luxury cosmetics empire with Bex Beauty, merging global innovation with speciﬁc GCC beauty ideals 17 .

These founders understand that inﬂuence is the spark, but operational excellence and cultural alignment are the engine.

The Trust Capital of the World

This is why the Middle East is winning. Brands here have realized that inﬂuencers are not a shortcut to conversion. They are the architects of trust. According to the 2026 Edelman

Trust Barometer, global trust is contracting inward. People are retreating into insular, values aligned circles, making it harder than ever for mass corporate messaging to penetrate 18 . Yet, the UAE topped the 2026 Edelman Trust Index globally with a score of 80 out of 100, up eight points from the previous year 19 .

Why? Because brands in the UAE and Saudi Arabia understood early that trust cannot be broadcast. It must be brokered. As Edelman research highlights, in an insular world, trust is built and scaled by creators who act as cultural mediators 18 .

This is backed by new academic research. A 2026 study from Imperial College Business School on inﬂuencer authenticity found that the era of renting credibility through one oﬀ posts is over 20 . Professor Omar Merlo research proves that when brands treat inﬂuencers as long term partners rather than transactional media channels, they move from a transactional to a transformational relationship with consumers 20 .

The Global Validation: Unilever Pivot

The model pioneered in the Middle East is now being adopted by the world largest advertisers. In early 2026, Unilever made a declaration that validated everything regional marketers have been building. The FMCG giant shifted 50 percent of its total digital advertising budget away from traditional corporate ads and directly into social media and creators 21 . By April 2026, that commitment had translated into a network of 300,000 inﬂuencers actively promoting Unilever brands globally 22 .

Unilever CMO Leandro Barreto described the strategy as building Desire at Scale, using creators to embed brands authentically in culture 22 . This is exactly what the Middle East has been doing for years. When a global giant like Unilever restructures its entire marketing apparatus to match the creator ﬁrst model, it proves that inﬂuencer marketing has oﬃcially graduated from the PR department to become the central nervous system of modern brand building.

The Academic Consensus on Brand Value

The data is clear, and the academic consensus is catching up to what we already know in the GCC. A recent Harvard Business Review study on how brand associations drive customer spending found that what consumers spontaneously think about a brand matters far more than what they agree with on a rating scale 23 . The research proves that brand equity is built through deep, authentic associations over time.

Furthermore, as McKinsey 2026 State of Marketing report highlights, branding has returned as the number one priority for marketing leaders globally 24 . CMOs view branding ability to drive distinctiveness and embody a clear value proposition as critical to building competitive diﬀerentiation 24 . In the Middle East, we know that the fastest, most authentic way to build that distinctiveness is through the voices of trusted creators.

The Way Forward: Leading the Next Era

The next wave of global marketing innovation will not come from Silicon Valley or Madison Avenue. It is coming from Dubai and Riyadh. According to EMARKETER, 57 percent of ad buyers globally say inﬂuencer ads and partnerships are their top investment priority for 2026. The world is ﬁnally waking up to the power of the creator economy, but the Middle

East is already living in its future.

We have moved past the vanity metrics. We have moved past the debate over whether inﬂuencers belong in PR or paid media. We have built an ecosystem where creators are the undisputed architects of mass awareness, brand trust, and deep consideration.

The Middle East audience is among the most digitally connected and brand aware anywhere in the world, and it expects marketing strategies that reﬂect that level of sophistication. Inﬂuencer marketing is not just growing here. It is setting the global standard. The brands that recognise this will not just win the region. They will lead the world.

Tech Features

UBER, MICROSOFT MOVES SIGNAL NEW PHASE IN ENTERPRISE AI ADOPTION

Published

2 days ago

June 1, 2026

Integrator Web-Admin

Expert commentary by Andreas Hassellöf, CEO of Ombori, on how enterprises are turning AI investment into measurable operational value and shifting from experimentation to disciplined adoption centred on workflows, governance, and business outcomes.

Large enterprises are beginning to speak more openly about the growing gap between AI adoption and measurable business outcomes, as companies reassess whether rising AI costs are translating into meaningful productivity gains.

Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald recently said the company is finding it “harder to justify” increasing AI spending after internal discussions highlighted the difficulty of linking higher usage of AI coding tools such as Claude Code to a proportional increase in useful consumer-facing features. The comments followed reports that Uber had exhausted its 2026 budget for Claude Code within the first four months of the year, while CEO Dara Khosrowshahi confirmed the company is slowing hiring as it increases investment in AI initiatives.

At the same time, Microsoft has reportedly begun reducing internal use of Anthropic’s Claude Code within parts of its business, shifting developers toward GitHub Copilot CLI instead. Reports suggested the move was tied to Microsoft’s broader push toward its own AI ecosystem and internal tooling strategy rather than a retreat from AI adoption itself.

The developments have triggered wider debate around whether enterprises are entering a more measured phase of AI adoption, with greater focus on operational value, integration, and cost management rather than usage alone.

However, Andreas Hassellöf, CEO of Ombori, believes the issue is less about the capability of AI and more about how organisations are adapting to it.

“The real challenge has nothing to do with whether AI can increase productivity. It clearly can,” Hassellöf said. “The harder part is getting people and organisations to adapt how they actually work so the technology delivers results.”

According to Hassellöf, many companies are seeing high adoption rates and surging token consumption but are struggling to convert that activity into measurable business value. “The bottleneck is rarely the technology itself,” he said. “It is how teams change their processes, measure real outcomes, and build new habits around the tools.”

He added that the industry is now entering a more mature phase of enterprise AI adoption, where businesses are beginning to move beyond experimentation and focus instead on operational discipline, governance, and measurable outcomes. Companies that succeed, he said, will be the ones that redesign workflows around AI rather than simply layering tools onto existing processes.

“Just chatting casually with an AI coding tool and expecting it to handle everything is not enough,” Hassellöf said. “It wastes tokens and often creates more problems than it solves.”

Instead, he argues that successful AI implementation requires structured workflows where multiple AI agents handle specialised tasks such as coding, reviewing, testing, and formatting, while humans remain responsible for setting goals, reviewing outputs, and ensuring alignment with business outcomes.

“The technology is powerful, but the human side of adoption will decide whether a company succeeds with AI or whether it becomes just another expensive experiment,” he said.

Tech Features

THE MIDDLE EAST’S DIGITAL FAULT LINES: A RESILIENCY BLUEPRINT FOR CIOS AND CTOS

Published

2 weeks ago

May 22, 2026

Integrator Web-Admin

Ahmad Shakora, Group Vice President- META, Cloudera

We are now in an era where digital connectivity underpins many areas such as commerce, security, governance, and social life.

In the Middle East, with ever-changing external factors, access to data has transitioned into a critical asset, with organisations and nations increasingly focused on protecting a vast array of information.

For businesses operating in this region, traditional efficiency-focused IT strategies are no longer sufficient. Robust business continuity and disaster recovery must take center stage.

The expanding risk matrix

The current operating environment highlights several areas of vulnerability for global digital infrastructure, demonstrating that risks can be either planned or entirely unexpected:

Government interventions can result in significant, sudden internet restrictions. Additionally, physical data center infrastructure is susceptible to multiple external factors. Severe and unpredictable environmental events, including extreme heat and unexpected flooding, can place a strain on the physical and cooling infrastructure of centralized data centers, forcing facilities offline
Unexpected impact on physical infrastructure can arise, causing noticeable latency
Total reliance on centralized third-party platforms amplifies operational risks. These can stem from planned events, such as routine maintenance and vendor migrations, or unplanned events, such as global software updates that inadvertently lead to widespread, cascading outages

In response to these varied and potentially compounding threats, the Gulf Cooperation Council is shifting from efficiency-first cloud adoption to resilience-first planning. Nations are accelerating investments in localized data centers, sovereign cloud environments, and multi-channel data access architectures that can withstand both cyberattacks and physical military threats.

In the UAE, the sovereign cloud market is projected to grow at a compound annual rate of 23% through 2033, signalling a sustained commitment to securing critical data and reducing exposure to fragile global dependencies.

When resilience becomes the backbone of survival

These external forces elevate Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery from a regulatory checkbox to a fundamental requirement for corporate survival. For CIOs and CTOs operating in the Middle East, ensuring operational resilience requires highly specific architectural choices.

Tech leaders who view infrastructure through a purely technical lens may be vulnerable. Data infrastructure must function as a strategic fortress. Resilience must supersede efficiency as the primary design goal. To continue operating amidst disruptions, tech leaders should look for the following differentiators when building their enterprise data infrastructure:

1. Cloud power, local control: do not put all the eggs in the public cloud basket. Organizations need a setup that works the same way whether it is in a giant data center or a small server at a remote branch. By running mini-clouds locally, enterprises keep the speed and control without being at the mercy of a service provider’s outage. Infrastructure must allow organizations to run data and AI workloads anywhere, converging the best of public cloud with on-premises deployments, including secure air-gapped environments.

2. Maintain internal control over enterprise AI: if there are disruptions to internet access or travel is restricted, AI shouldn’t stop working. Sovereign Private AI, by design, brings the thinking power to where the data actually sits. This keeps sensitive data secure and ensures automated systems stay online even if the rest of the world goes offline.

3. Diversify technology partners: tech leaders should implement an Open Data Lakehouse architecture that unifies 100% of the organization’s data to avoid vendor lock-in and catastrophic single points of failure. A critical design principle to look for is the strict separation of compute and storage. By utilizing highly scalable, S3-compatible object storage independently from computing power, enterprises can leverage robust data replication and erasure coding to ensure high durability, guaranteeing that all backup data remains safely within sovereign boundaries.

4. One view, no silos: managing fragmented data across a region during a crisis can be chaotic. CIOs need a Unified Data Fabric that breaks down silos and provides a single view of all organizational data with centralized, end-to-end security and governance across complex hybrid environments. Coupled with this, infrastructure must support Data in Motion: the ability to seamlessly move and process real-time data from any source to any destination. If a subsea cable is damaged or a data center goes offline, this capability ensures business-critical decisions can still be made seamlessly as traffic reroutes.

5. Visibility & isolation: Operational survival requires extreme visibility. A resilient infrastructure must feature granular observability across the full IT stack for proactive health monitoring, incident response, and data-flow policy enforcement. By using containers to isolate different tasks, enterprises can ensure that if one part of the business encounters technical issues, the risk is contained, protecting critical operations.

The future of business in the Middle East belongs to leaders who treat their infrastructure as a sovereign fortress.

True resilience requires moving past simple cloud adoption to build localized, hyper-resilient architectures that remain fully functional when global networks fail. CIOs and CTOs must now prioritize digital autonomy by anchoring their most critical operations in hardened, local environments that can withstand physical and international uncertainties. By designing for total isolation, leaders can ensure their organization remains operational and secure regardless of regional instability. The ultimate competitive advantage is the ability to maintain power and connectivity.

Tech Features

FIVE WAYS B2B MEDTECH MARKETPLACES ARE RESHAPING HEALTHCARE BUSINESS

Published

2 weeks ago

May 21, 2026

Integrator Web-Admin

Healthcare and wellness businesses across the GCC are growing in a market that is becoming more digital, specialised, and commercially active. The GCC healthcare market is projected to grow from $121.9 billion in 2025 to $170.5 billion by 2030, according to Research and Markets, creating stronger demand for trusted platforms that connect buyers, sellers, service providers, and investors. Yet many businesses still rely on personal networks, fragmented supplier searches, and informal channels when selling equipment, finding operational support, or exploring business transactions.

MedSahra, the first B2B MedTech ecosystem platform focused on healthcare and wellness trade across the GCC, outlines five facts that show how marketplaces can bring more structure to this evolving sector.

Verified businesses build trust

Healthcare transactions often involve high-value assets and licensed businesses, which makes trust essential from the first interaction. A B2B marketplace becomes stronger when sellers and buyers are verified before they engage with others. This can include requesting documentation that confirms a company is legally registered and operational. For buyers, this reduces uncertainty. For sellers, it creates a more credible environment where serious business conversations can begin with greater confidence.

Private listings support business sales

Selling a healthcare or wellness business is often sensitive because owners may not want staff, competitors or the wider market to know they are exploring a transaction. In many cases, owners are left to rely on word-of-mouth or private referrals because there is no clear, specialised marketplace for these opportunities. Public listings can create unnecessary concern among employees, patients, and competitors before a deal is even serious. Private listings can make this process more practical by allowing sellers to present opportunities discreetly, while helping buyers discover small private clinics to large hospitals in different sectors, including general, dental, dermatology, cosmetology, pediatric and others areas, with existing infrastructure, equipment, and customer bases.

Equipment access becomes more efficient

Medical equipment is a major investment, yet many owners struggle to sell pre-owned devices through the usual channels. In some cases, distributors may only buy back equipment when the owner is purchasing a new device, which leaves clinic owners with limited options when they simply want to sell. A dedicated marketplace creates a clearer route for listing and discovering all types of medical and wellness equipment, whether new or pre-owned, across healthcare and wellness categories, including dental, diagnostic, general medical, cosmetology and others. This is increasingly relevant as the UAE medical devices market is projected to grow from $3.18 billion in 2025 to $4.71 billion by 2032, according to Fortune Business Insights. Marketplaces can also help users find providers for repair, calibration, upgrades and spare parts.

Support services become easier to find

Running a clinic or wellness business requires more than medical expertise, and finding reliable service providers can be a constant operational challenge. Owners often depend on search engines, personal recommendations, or scattered supplier contacts when they need support for digital marketing, accounting, logistics, customs, software development, printing, pest control, equipment repair, calibration, hardware upgrades, or software upgrades. A B2B marketplace can make supplier discovery more structured by bringing relevant service providers into one professional ecosystem where businesses can compare options and start conversations more efficiently.

Consulting adds structure to transactions

Complex business decisions often require specialist support, especially when buying equipment, selling a clinic, or preparing for a larger transaction. Consulting partners can support areas such as M&A, accounting, audit, legal guidance, equipment planning, and operational readiness. This advisory layer is becoming more important as healthcare providers adopt more connected technologies, with GCC connected medical devices and wearables projected to grow at a CAGR of around 20.19% between 2025 and 2030, according to MarkNtel Advisors. A marketplace that connects businesses with relevant experts can help transactions become more informed, secure, and commercially viable.