Harry Menear looks at the rise of the micro-influencer in the MENA region, as consumers increasingly resent traditional advertising. How do authenticity and AI come into play, and what does the future hold for MENA's influencer economy?

It feels awfully quaint to reflect, in 2025, that influencer marketing was, quite recently, treated as something of an afterthought. Even in 2019, influencer campaigns were still seen as a nice-to-have, somewhere to allocate the leftover budget in support of the ‘actual campaign’.

We’re living in a very different world today. Whether you’re looking to spend millions of dollars to speak to tens of millions of fans via Christiano Ronaldo or Kylie Jenner, or tap into vast grassroots networks of nano-influencers who reach a few thousand consumers at a time, influencer marketing is an integral part of any modern communication strategy. 

Relatable, authentic, and authoritative: Influencers in an age of skepticism

We’re living in an era of skepticism, where consumers increasingly resent traditional advertising, rejecting brand voices in favour of more relatable voices with greater perceived authenticity. 

In few places is this trend exhibited more strongly than in the MENA (Middle East North Africa) region. Here we have one of the world’s highest rates of digital penetration and a young population raised in a mobile-first ecosystem. Influencer marketing is big business in the region, with the influencer market expected to reach AED 4.7bn (£970m) this year. Three-quarters of UAE residents have said they actively follow and pay attention to social media influencers. 

But influencer marketing isn’t a guarantee of ROI. MENA audiences are also shaped by a stronger influence of tradition and stricter social norms. Also relevant is the fact that recent years have also seen governments in the region become more heavily involved in regulating and harnessing new advertising trends to promote their agendas and drive their economies. The result has been a pretty radical shift in the influencer marketing landscape, especially in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. 

“MENA went from the Wild West of influencer marketing to one of the world’s most structured creator economies,” explains Surbhi Lal, a strategy and content account manager at The Romans UAE, an international agency whose Emirati office specialises in helping its clients (which include Unilever, Snapchat, and AirBnB) reach MENA audiences. The UAE, where Lah is based, “led the charge” here, licensing creators, taxing them like real businesses, and building government-backed platforms like Billion Follower Summit, NAS Summit, and Creators HQ. She reflects: “The message is clear: creators here aren’t ‘content kids’, they’re media professionals powering the region’s cultural and economic engine.”

What you have, then, is a perfect cocktail of tech and cultural alignment that can make influencer marketing especially effective and, therefore, lucrative, but only if done right. 

From macro to micro: “Real beats perfect” 

Brands in MENA are heavily invested in macro and mega-influencers, who represent 60% of influencer engagements. The majority of MENA brands run relatively few influencer campaigns per year, with 61.5% conducting fewer than five campaigns and 71.8% working with fewer than ten influencers per campaign.

However, advertisers are increasingly coming to realise that an over-reliance on large-scale visibility often misses out on the nuanced engagement offered by nano and micro-influencers. After all, the selling point of an influencer is the trust, local perspective, and credibility they provide. 

“Micro-influencers feel like people you actually know,” explains Lah. In MENA, she continues, relatability is quickly becoming more important than reach. “Audiences trust creators who live like them, shop where they shop, and speak their language. Global mega-influencers only work if they show real stories with real cultural fluency. Here, real beats perfect every time.”

Agencies like The Romans are eagerly tapping into the potential for micro-influencers to foster deeper audience connections and enhance brand credibility.

Recently, the Romans launched two large international brands in the MENA region, harnessing local micro-influencers to grow a more organic, authentic kind of visibility. The first was the introduction of Wynn Resorts, where, Lah explains, “we built a floating golf hole and a tee-off green 22-stories up on an active construction site. We challenged local, beloved golfing influencers with media personalities and three international golf pros to attempt to land the world’s highest hole in one.” 

The second was November’s launch of beauty giant e.l.f in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. “This was a significant influencer task, collaborating with (literally) hundreds of local influencers that met a specific everyperson brand criteria,” Lah continues. The Romans led their campaign with “sumptuous and exclusive preview dinners, creative product seeding, and digital collabs” to great success. 

Authenticity and AI? 

Two terms that don’t often cohabit. However, Lah explains that leveraging cutting-edge AI tech and the authenticity of micro-influencers aren’t a mutually exclusive proposition in MENA. This is delivered, she explains, with a combination of pro-tech government policy and strong regulation, holding up the UAE as an example. 

“With a Minister of AI, hyper-digital government policy, and some of the world’s best online infrastructure, the UAE has built a creator economy that’s clean, compliant, and future-proof,” she says. Because the UAE has built tighter licensing and disclosure rules than the US or UK, “consumers trust that the people they follow are vetted, regulated, and accountable – and that trust translates into impact. Tech is MENA’s unfair advantage.” 

Far from weeding out AI-first content that closely imitates “authentic” human voices, however, the UAE’s regulatory bedrock is providing the foundations for a new breed of micro-influencer – one that isn’t human at all. 

In April, Radix Media MENA launched an AI influencer. The AI personality named Mayaseen.R has fewer than 2,500 followers when “she” officially secured partnerships with UAE-based Brands For Less. You don’t get much more micro than that. 

What does the future hold for MENA’s influencer economy? 

While AI casts an uncertain shadow and mega-influencers still command much of the MENA market, there is an undeniable shift taking place across the region. Brands are gravitating toward home grown micro-influencers, attracted by the power of authenticity and local knowledge over celebrity and broad appeal. 

“Influencers are becoming a new retail channel, not just recommending products, but effectively being the storefront,” Lah enthuses. In the future, as “content creation becomes the region’s favourite side hustle,” she predicts a “flood of new creators” entering the market. Humanity will, she adds, remain a central selling point, even in an age of AI influencers and AI-generated content. As brands “chase ever more unconventional partnerships to stand out,” she believes “the next era of personification won’t be animated mascots – it’ll be human ones.”