We sat down with Terry Kane, managing director, Middle East & Africa, The Trade Desk to discuss what’s driving the programmatic ecosystem…

Programmatic advertising in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is gathering pace, as brands and agencies in the region move beyond traditional buying methods toward more data-driven, automated approaches. 

To unpack what's driving this shift, ExchangeWire sat down with Terry Kane of The Trade Desk to discuss the current state of MENA's programmatic landscape, including the ad formats gaining the most traction with regional advertisers, the unique market dynamics shaping adoption, and what marketers should expect as the ecosystem continues to mature.

How would you characterise the current state of programmatic adoption across the region, and where are you seeing the fastest acceleration?

MENA is a market of enormous potential at a genuine inflection point. Digital advertising spend in the region reached USD $8.185bn (£604.2bn) in 2025, and programmatic in MEA is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.89% over the next five years, from USD $20bn (£15.1bn) in 2025 to USD $31.6bn (£23.8bn) in 2031. That trajectory puts us firmly in the top tier of global growth markets.

But growth and maturity are not the same thing. The honest characterisation is that we have a sophisticated layer of global buyers and advanced agencies operating at the front of the market, while the broader supply-side ecosystem - publishers, data owners, telcos, retailers - is still finding its footing with biddable, data-driven buying. That's where the real acceleration opportunity sits.

The fastest momentum right now is in CTV and retail media, for different structural reasons. CTV is about to shift materially as global players launch premium ad-tier offerings in the region, which will fundamentally change available inventory. Retail media is earlier stage but potentially more transformative. The GCC retail sector is projected to reach USD $387bn (£292.2bn) by 2028, and we're already seeing leading regional players begin to activate that first-party data intelligently.

Which formats are currently popular in MENA - CTV, retail media, DOOH?

All three are in play, but they're at very different stages of the journey.

CTV has real momentum on the demand side. 65% of United Arab Emirates residents watch streaming content daily, and people across MENA spend roughly 70% of their online time on the open internet, including premium video. The gap between audience attention and ad investment in this channel is significant, and that imbalance represents one of the biggest disruptions in the market right now. The constraint until now has been supply. Quality inventory exists but scale has been limited. That's changing as global streaming platforms bring ad-tier models to the region.

DOOH is growing but fragmented. Supply is expanding across the region, yet standardised measurement and reporting remain underdeveloped. Buying is still largely siloed by individual market rather than regionally, which eliminates many of the data advantages programmatic is designed to deliver.

Retail media is the most exciting emerging format precisely because the underlying data assets are exceptional. We're talking about retailers logging hundreds of thousands of customers daily, with tens of millions of loyalty members. That's a scale most markets can only aspire to. The opportunity is real, but it's still early, and activating those assets intelligently at scale will define who wins in this space.

Data infrastructure and identity remain key challenges globally; how are you approaching addressability, and are there any region-specific solutions or workarounds emerging?

MENA actually has extraordinary raw ingredients for identity: telcos serving hundreds of millions of subscribers, a single major retailer with over 20 million loyalty members logging more than 770,000 customers daily, CTV platforms building authenticated audiences at pace. The challenge isn't the data. It's connecting it.

The core problem is fragmentation. On mobile a user is a MAID, on desktop a cookie, on CTV one of a fragmented mess of identifiers that don't communicate. Without a unified identity solution, advertisers are guessing. With one, they can understand a single customer's full journey across screens and act on it with precision.

Retail Data is an enormous opportunity, with the majority of retailers sitting on a data goldmine, but not understanding how to monetise it. With companies like Noon, Careem and major retailers like AlShaya and Majlid Al Futtaim, there is so much scope for the GCC in particular not just to be good, but to be leading globally on the retail data opportunity. 

The approach we're advancing is built on open, privacy-safe identity frameworks, specifically UID, as the connective layer across the open internet. This isn't theoretical. Publishers running on UID have seen effective CPM uplifts of up to 116% compared to cookie-based inventory. In European markets, brands are reporting up to 30% improvements in campaign effectiveness under GDPR, one of the most stringent data regimes in the world. This is why we are committed to making TTD open to all high-quality data partners who believe in the future of the open internet.  

The honest assessment for MENA is that buy-side adoption remains cautious. The financial incentive isn't yet obvious enough to the market, and there’s a perception that marketeers get free data form other providers, whereas in reality that’s not the case as these costs are built into their CPMs and reflect only what they want companies and brands to buy. Until there are clear regional proof points demonstrating how identity and data activation combine to drive tangible campaign outcomes, it will continue to be treated as a future investment rather than a present-day necessity. Closing that gap is the work in front of us. The pieces exist, what's missing is demonstrated ROI at scale regionally. Globally, The Trade Desk delivers measurable value at every stage of the advertising journey, combining performance, efficiency, and transparency to drive real business impact. The result: 3× greater audience expansion, 37% less wasted spend, and 4× stronger ROAS.

Many global brands are increasing investment in the region - what are they still getting wrong about MENA audiences, and how can programmatic help close that gap?

The most persistent mistake is the mismatch between where audiences actually spend their time and where budgets actually go. Around 70% of MENA consumers' online time is spent on the open internet on premium streaming, trusted news sites, digital audio like Spotify and Anghami, yet this bears no resemblance to how the majority of digital investment is allocated. That imbalance is costing brands more than they realise, and it compounds over time.

The second mistake is treating MENA as a single market rather than a richly diverse one. It's a mobile-first region with one of the world's youngest populations, where consumers move fluidly across a wide range of digital platforms. Fragmented, channel-by-channel buying misses the omnichannel reality of how people here actually behave.

There's also a misconception that programmatic equals lower quality. It doesn't. Access to premium, brand-safe inventory at scale, across CTV, audio, DOOH, and beyond, is exactly what programmatic enables. The Trade Desk's global inventory partners include CNN, Disney, Netflix, DAZN, and Spotify, among others. Quality isn't the trade-off; lack of control is what you give up when you stay inside walled gardens. In our region, we have access to the top CTV, top audio, top display, and top DOOH providers – the most premium audiences, on a transparent platform. 

Programmatic closes these gaps because it forces rigour. It demands that you follow the audience, activate real data, measure actual outcomes, and make decisions based on performance, not assumptions about where budgets have historically sat.

Looking ahead, what are the defining signals you're watching that will indicate MENA is transitioning from a developing to a truly mature programmatic ecosystem?

There are three signals I'm watching closely.

The first is supply structure. Right now, too much of the CTV and DOOH market operates on guaranteed deal structures that limit flexibility for both buyers and publishers. Publishers can't optimise yield in real time; buyers can't adjust targeting, creative, or frequency based on performance. Maturity means flexible, outcome-driven access becoming standard alongside guaranteed deals, not instead of them. When new premium CTV supply arrives in volume, the question is whether the market has the mechanics in place to activate it intelligently.

The second is identity adoption moving from cautious to committed on the buy side. When regional buyers begin treating identity infrastructure as a current operational necessity rather than a future investment, when they can point to clear MENA proof points of improved campaign precision and measurable ROI, that's a structural shift.

The third is broadening participation. Today, the most sophisticated programmatic conversations happen between a relatively small group of advanced agencies and global buyers. Real maturity means the supply-side ecosystem joins the conversation at scale: publishers diversifying revenue through programmatic, telcos, and retailers monetising first-party data assets across the open internet, and a broader base of MENA brands operating with genuine technical fluency. That expansion of participation is what a mature ecosystem actually looks like.