In her column this week, Charlotte McEleny speaks to Initiative UAE and Publicis Groupe ME, to discover why where the youth audience are and where the budget goes is still misaligned…

MENA’s under-25 population spends a disproportionate share of its digital time on platforms that remain underserved by programmatic budgets. To unpick this, ExchangeWire spoke to Rahul Karam, head of performance media at Initiative UAE, and Pankaj Pagrani, head of data sciences at Publicis Groupe ME, to see what it would take to close it.

Across MENA, a generation has built its digital life largely outside the channels that attract most of the advertising budget. 

As an example, according to Dentsu’s 2024 Attention Economy report, over 90% of Saudis aged 13–34 actively use Snapchat, with a monthly addressable audience exceeding 25 million users. On average, users open Snapchat more than 50 times a day, underscoring its presence in everyday routines.

The platforms where under-25s spend their time, the communities they inhabit online, and the formats through which they consume content are all well documented, but what remains stubbornly misaligned is where the money goes. But understanding this chasm requires looking less at the platforms themselves and more at the infrastructure that has made some easier to buy and others difficult to justify.

Structural inertia over strategic intent

The gap between audience behaviour and budget allocation is not, in itself, a mystery. 

Rahul Karam, head of performance media at Initiative UAE, is direct about this being an issue of media home comforts.

“The duopoly’s dominance reflects structural inertia, not strategic intent,” he says. “Meta and Google deliver frictionless attribution, predictable returns, and near-guaranteed performance benchmarks. When clients demand immediate ROI, comfort consistently wins over curiosity.”

Pankaj Pagrani, head of data sciences at Publicis Groupe ME, calls it a question of maturity. “The fact that a gap exists even though we know where the youth spend their time is down to infrastructural maturity, more than anything else,” he explains.

“Media investment is dependent on what can be measured and optimised consistently, and the mature players’ ad ecosystems have evolved to incorporate attribution, optimisation and reporting, as well as make data available for external, cross-channel measurement. This makes it easier to fit them into the organic agency workflows and into a unified measurement framework,” he adds.

The consequence is that newer platforms, even those with significant youth audiences, get treated with wariness “The newer platforms are treated with a bit more caution, almost as quasi ‘experimental’ investments,” Pagrani adds.

"Gen Z rules culture..."

There is a demographic wrinkle to the picture, too, as Karam notes that the platforms where MENA youth are most concentrated have not yet fully cracked the high-value verticals that command the largest budgets. 

“There’s also a demographic reality: Gen Z rules culture, but Millennials and Boomers still hold the wallets in high-value verticals like real estate, luxury, and travel. TikTok and Snapchat have earned their place in beauty and fashion, but consistently anchoring big-ticket transactions remains the next frontier,” he explains.

Both practitioners see the gap narrowing. “Rigorous MMM studies now validate these platforms as full-funnel performance engines, not speculative brand plays,” says Karam. “Younger platforms have stopped asking for consideration and started presenting proof. The gap isn’t closing gradually. It’s compressing fast, and the advertisers who moved early are already capturing the arbitrage advantage.”

Pagrani points to a parallel shift in how advertisers define success: as the focus moves from reach to incrementality, channels with heavy youth audiences become harder to ignore, regardless of measurement maturity.

A market that breaks the models

If the macro, global problem is one of measurement maturity, MENA’s version is even harder to solve. The region’s geography, demography, and infrastructure create addressability challenges that standard global models were not built to handle. Karam identifies the core issue plainly: “MENA breaks the assumptions baked into standard addressability models.”

“In Dubai or Doha, a single geo holds hundreds of nationalities, fragmenting algorithmic targeting before it starts. Linguistic boundaries are equally fluid: Arabic youth code-switch seamlessly, while expats engage with local content sporadically, creating digital footprints that standard models simply cannot read,” he explains.

First-party data compounds rather than resolves the problem as Karam cites regional super-apps as a case in point: “Regional super-apps like Noon serve such vast SKU diversity that the same user profile buys luxury watches and two-dollar energy drinks in the same session. That is not a behavioural segment; it is an algorithmic edge case. Addressability here demands building for a non-linear, conversational reality, not retrofitting a global playbook onto a market that was never designed to fit it.”

Pagrani’s analysis points to a problem at the data layer: the region is mobile-first and relatively young, creating fragmentation from the ground up.

“IDs need to be resolved across various data sources; CRMs, websites, apps, loyalty programmes, and call centres, and this is complicated,” he says. “Many organisations are still trying to build a single customer view before they can even think about advanced addressability.”

The Gulf versus Egypt and North Africa

The measurement problem, however, is not uniform across MENA. Both practitioners draw a distinction between GCC markets and markets like Egypt and Morocco. In Egypt and Morocco, the problem is a lack of data. 

Karam explains: “Macro currency pressures have kept large portions of the economy anchored to cash and traditional retail. A digital campaign can trigger a significant real-world sales spike, yet if the transaction completes at a local merchant in cash, it leaves no digital trace. Proving incrementality becomes near-impossible.”

Compounding this is a cultural practice that defeats user-level tracking before it starts: “The cultural norm of device and account sharing among North African youth. When multiple family members move through a single smartphone, user-level attribution stops being a science and becomes informed guesswork.”

In the Gulf, the problem is excess rather than absence. “The Gulf presents the exact inverse: an identity surplus,” Karam says. “With multiple mobile connections per user, the same individual behaves differently across separate screens and accounts. You are no longer tracking three people on one device. You are tracking one person presenting as two entirely distinct digital entities.”

A change in strategy

Pagrani argues the industry needs to change its methodology, rather than persist with approaches designed for cleaner data environments.

“Rather than relying solely on user-level attribution, we need to adopt more aggregated approaches that combine econometric techniques like Marketing Mix Modelling with platform-based incrementality experiments, such as conversion lift studies,” he explains. “Together, these provide a much more realistic view of which channels are driving incremental business outcomes, even when individual journeys can’t be observed end-to-end.”

For Pagrani, that changes the question clients should be asking. “The bigger question isn’t ‘Which platform drove this conversion?’ It’s ‘What incremental value did each platform contribute, and how do they work together?’ That’s a much more useful way to think about ROI for today’s youth audiences.”

Karam’s read on where clients currently stand is blunter: “Clients are still asking platform-level questions when the measurement problem is fundamentally structural.”

Strategy versus execution

The gap between what planners know and what buyers actually do is one of the challenges to emerge from both perspectives. Karam and Pagrani acknowledge that media strategy is increasingly informed by audience behaviour, but that execution lags behind.

“Media plans are technically data-informed, but the underlying data for under-25s in MENA is overwhelmingly inferred, probabilistic, and structurally unreliable,” says Karam. “Budget allocation does not purely follow the audience. It follows the plumbing.”

Pagrani describes the split by client risk appetite. “Strategists generally start with audience behaviour and media consumption, so the strategic recommendation is increasingly data-led. However, execution often defaults towards platforms where buying, optimisation, and measurement are more mature,” he says.

For more conservative clients, platforms with significant audience share but weaker measurement infrastructure still get treated as experimental and receive investment that does not reflect their actual reach. The practical outcome is that spend gravitates to wherever a defensible outcome can be reported, regardless of where the audience actually is.

“Marketers are not investing where under-25s are most deeply engaged. They are investing where the infrastructure lets them report a defensible outcome to stakeholders. We do not have an audience problem. We have an infrastructure dependency,” says Karam.

Retail media is cited by both as a leading indicator of how this dynamic is beginning to change.

“As Retail Media Networks mature and brands gain access to richer first-party data, they’re becoming more confident in shifting budgets based on audience and commerce insights rather than relying solely on established measurement infrastructure,” Pagrani notes.

What closing the gap would actually change

But if the infrastructure problems were resolved overnight, what would MENA marketers actually do differently? Karam sees it as the removal of an institutional safety net.

“If the infrastructure caught up tomorrow, the ultimate corporate safety net would vanish. Advertisers would finally stop paying the measurability tax, defaulting to legacy platforms not because they perform best, but because they generate the easiest charts for stakeholder sign-off,” he explains.

The capital movement he envisions would mean meaningful budgets shifting into platforms like Twitch and Telegram, unlocking gaming communities and messaging ecosystems at scale; retail media investment proportionate to its actual audience pull; and local creator investment scaling beyond what current infrastructure can justify on paper.

“But the more meaningful change would be behavioural: planners would stop reverse-engineering audience strategies around what the infrastructure can measure, and start building for where attention actually lives. That reordering of logic, from measurement convenience to audience truth, is what better infrastructure would actually unlock,” he adds.

Pagrani’s vision is more about precision than redirection. “I don’t think marketers would suddenly spend more; they’d spend more confidently,” he says.

Better identity resolution would enable frequency management across platforms rather than within them, reducing duplicated exposure and ad fatigue. The picture of how channels work together would sharpen considerably.

“Instead of trying to prove which platform ‘won’ the conversion, marketers could focus on the incremental contribution each channel makes to the overall outcome,” Pagrani explains. “Ultimately, we’d move away from optimising channels in isolation and towards optimising audiences across the entire ecosystem.”

MENA’s youth audience is not invisible; it is well documented, highly engaged, and increasingly influential as a spending cohort. But the problem is not that marketers don’t know where to find them; it is that the tools currently available make it far easier to justify spending somewhere else.