Following on from her recent look into the podcast market in MENA, Charlotte McEleny chats to Rasha Hanzeh about the AI future of audio…

Rasha Hanzeh sits on both sides of the MENA audio question, advising brands at The Inhouse and producing Luca’s Insight Track. She talks to ExchangeWire about market fragmentation, Egypt’s subscription experiments, and why she has started applying search thinking to podcast discovery.

Most of the MENA audio conversation is about where the ad money is going. Hanzeh is more interested in what happens to the medium as AI makes content cheap to produce, and in the commercial models that don’t depend on advertising at all.

You came to podcasting from a brand-building angle rather than a media-buying one. What drew you in?

With the rise of AI and the ability to create content at an incredible speed and scale, I think we’re heading into a real sea of sameness. There will be more content, more noise, and more brands saying very similar things. As a result, personal branding has become a much bigger conversation for many of our clients. People want to know who’s behind the brand. They want personality, perspective, expertise and, ultimately, something that feels real.

When you spend 30 or 60 minutes listening to someone, you start to build a very different kind of relationship with them. You hear their personality, their opinions, the way they think, even the little things that make them human. It can feel incredibly intimate, almost like you’re getting to know the person rather than simply consuming their content. That’s a level of connection that's hard to achieve through traditional advertising or short-form content, and I think it gets more valuable as AI makes authentic human voices scarcer.

Listenership in the region is strong. What is stopping the ad money from matching it?

The market is still incredibly fragmented. Thousands of podcasters span different genres, nationalities, languages, and platforms, but there isn’t yet a standardised way to package, value, and sell that inventory.

We’re also seeing a knowledge gap on both sides. Many brands and agencies are still figuring out how to use podcasts effectively, while many podcasters don’t necessarily have the commercial experience or infrastructure to monetise their audiences. That’s beginning to change, with players such as Thamanyah and Insat Media helping clients navigate where and how to invest, but we’re still in the early stages of building the ecosystem.

What is interesting is that brands want to go beyond traditional sponsorships and actually curate content with podcasters, which I think is where the medium becomes particularly powerful.

Egypt keeps coming up as the overlooked market. What are you seeing there that isn’t happening in the Gulf?

Egypt is often overlooked because media budgets there are significantly lower than in Saudi and the UAE, but the audience, talent and appetite for content are absolutely there. We’re already seeing Egyptian shows experimenting with paid YouTube, Apple subscriptions and paywalled content, models that haven’t necessarily gained the same traction in the UAE and Saudi yet.

So I don’t think the opportunity is necessarily about where the biggest budgets are today. It’s about where there is a large, engaged audience and a relatively underdeveloped commercial ecosystem. Egypt has that combination, which makes it particularly interesting for the next phase of growth.

What companies are leading in MENA audio advertising?

We haven’t seen a clear winner yet, and that’s precisely what makes the market interesting. Spotify has the scale, YouTube has enormous reach, and Anghami has a strong regional audience, but none of them has fully established itself as the definitive home for audio advertising across the region. Deezer, in particular, doesn’t currently have a particularly active presence in MENA.

The bigger opportunity is cross-platform. Players such as Podeo and Next Audio help agencies and advertisers reach audio audiences across multiple platforms, rather than building their strategy around one ecosystem.

I don’t think the winner will simply be the platform that makes audio easiest to buy for advertisers. It will be the ecosystem that creates the strongest value exchange between listeners, podcasters and advertisers, attracting audiences because the content is compelling, giving creators the tools to build sustainable businesses, and giving advertisers meaningful access to those communities. In a market as diverse as MENA, that may matter more than sheer scale.

And what’s your perspective on attribution?

The industry needs to stop trying to force audio into a purely performance-marketing framework. Podcasts are fundamentally an attention and influence medium, and the measurement framework needs to reflect that. Better brand-lift studies, consistent audience measurement, clearer benchmarks and stronger integration with first-party data will be critical to unlocking larger budgets.

You’ve been working on something you call Podcast Engine Optimisation. What is it?

We’ve been thinking a lot about how people discover and engage with podcasts. That led us to develop what we call Podcast Engine Optimisation, or PEO: applying the thinking behind search and discoverability to podcasts, so great conversations don’t just get created, but have a better chance of being found by the right people.

For me, that’s where the opportunity is: using technology to make us more effective, while becoming even more intentional about creating content with substance, personality and a genuine human point of view.