AI is turning Gulf advertising from a guessing game into a measurable science

More than a century ago, the American retailer John Wanamaker complained that half the money he spent on advertising was wasted, and that he simply did not know which half.

For most of our industry’s history, that uncertainty was the cost of doing business.

Brands bought reach and exposure, ran their campaigns and hoped the message landed.

As someone who has spent more than two decades building out-of-home networks across this region, I have lived with that trade-off for most of my career.

Artificial intelligence is finally closing Wanamaker’s gap. The most important shift underway in Gulf advertising is not that machines can now write a headline or generate an image in seconds, though they can. It is that AI is moving our entire industry away from broad exposure and toward intelligent planning, precise optimization and better decisions.

Generative AI tools are helping teams draft copy, shape concepts, create visual directions and adapt content for different audiences in a fraction of the time.

For a regional market that must produce campaigns in both Arabic and English, often for several markets at once, this is a genuine and welcome efficiency.

But I would caution anyone who believes that content creation is where AI’s real value lies.

When every brand can access the same generative tools, the risk is a wave of competent, forgettable, interchangeable advertising: what the industry already calls “creative fatigue.”

Technology can accelerate craft, but it cannot supply the cultural insight, brand judgment and storytelling that make people stop and feel something.

The agencies that win will use AI to free their people for the work only people can do.

The deeper transformation is happening upstream, in how campaigns are planned, bought and improved.

AI can read market and audience signals at a speed no human team could match, from behavior and location to timing, context and campaign response.

This allows investment to move faster toward what is working, rather than waiting for a post-campaign report.

For business leaders, the value is in the ability to make better choices with greater confidence.

AI’s real contribution is in understanding which channels, messages and moments actually drive results, and moving investment accordingly.

It shifts the conversation from “How many people did we reach?” to “What did our spend actually achieve?” 

Technology can accelerate craft, but it cannot supply cultural insight, brand judgment, storytelling to make people feel 

That mirrors a wider shift across the global industry, away from reach and visibility and toward attention, effectiveness and the outcomes a campaign actually delivers.

This is particularly relevant in the Gulf, where consumers are highly connected, digitally engaged and increasingly responsive to personalized experiences.

A campaign in Riyadh, Jeddah, Dubai or Doha may reach audiences across outdoor media, mobile, search, social, streaming and retail on the same day.

The challenge for brands is not just to be present across these touchpoints, but to create a coherent experience across them.

For many years, traditional media and digital media were treated as separate ecosystems.

Outdoor advertising, for example, was often viewed primarily as a mass awareness channel, while digital was seen as more targeted and measurable.

Technology is changing that distinction. Digital screens, better planning tools and stronger measurement are making physical media environments smarter and more accountable.

Outdoor is gaining the ability to be planned with more intelligence and connected more clearly to the wider customer journey.

A digital outdoor campaign can now be planned with more intelligence around location, time of day, audience movement, nearby retail activity, weather, events and traffic patterns.

Anonymized mobility data and computer-vision audience measurement reveal who actually passes a screen and when, while dynamic creative can change automatically in response to weather, traffic or time of day.

A coffee brand can promote iced drinks as the temperature climbs and switch to hot ones as it falls, on the same screen, on the same afternoon.

This evolution is especially relevant in the Gulf, where governments are investing heavily in digital transformation, artificial intelligence, entrepreneurship and future industries.

Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 and similar national agendas across the GCC are creating economies that are more connected, more competitive and less dependent on traditional growth models.

Advertising and marketing are part of that transformation because they influence how businesses scale, how consumers discover products and how cities communicate with residents, visitors and investors.

A more advanced media industry supports a stronger digital economy.

At the same time, experience teaches us that no tool can compensate for poor judgment. More automation does not automatically mean better advertising.

Poor data, weak strategy or generic creative will still produce weak results, even if AI is involved.

Brands also need to be careful about privacy, transparency, intellectual property, cultural sensitivity and brand safety.

The goal should not be to automate every decision, but to combine machine intelligence with human accountability.

The future of advertising in the Gulf will be shaped by this partnership between human creativity and intelligent technology.

The winners will not necessarily be the brands that use the most tools, but those that ask better questions: Which audiences are we trying to influence? Which environments create the strongest attention? Which investments are truly working? How do we measure real impact?

AI can help answer these questions faster and more accurately, but the strategic direction must still come from people.

The region has an opportunity to lead in this space, by using AI to build a more effective, innovative and responsible advertising industry. 

• Sami Al Mufleh is the founder and CEO of Hills Advertising, one of the Middle East’s leading advertising and media companies. Over the past two decades he has been involved in the development, operation and commercialization of large-scale media infrastructure across the region.