Join us for a Future of Marketing Solutions webinar from MMA Global, in partnership with Meta and BAMM Global, to uncover groundbreaking research on how this influential generation connects, consumes, and converts.

 Tuesday, July 15, 2025
 Choose your LIVE session:
→ 12:30 – 1:00 PM BST (7:30 AM – 8:00 AM EDT)
→ 12:30 – 1:00 PM EDT

What You’ll Learn:

Connection = Content 67% of Gen Z share videos to express themselves. Learn how your brand can show up in more meaningful, human ways.

Culture = Curation With 63% curating feeds around personal passions, discover how to use short-form video to reflect Gen Z’s individuality. Discovery = Seamless 78% find brands inside short videos – without clicking – and 76% say they are receptive to hearing about brands from creators. See how creators and Reels can amplify your next product launch.

Paul Stringer, Managing Editor of Research & Insights, WARC, said, “The pandemic has resulted in improved digital marketing capabilities. But driving growth in the digital age brings new complexities and marketing needs. 

In image above: Paul Stringer, Managing Editor of Research & Insights, WARC

“Insights into where to allocate investments, what objectives and tactics to choose, and what capabilities to develop are outlined in this must-read report that will help the marketing community future-proof for business success.” 

This study is based on an online survey conducted in APAC by WARC in association with the MMA. Carried out between July and September 2022, more than 700 marketing professionals took part, a mix of client-side, agency, media owner, and technology vendor marketers.

The State of Modern marketing in APAC 2022 highlights the following key insights:

• Marketers feel confident in their digital marketing capabilities despite third citing skills as a barrier to digital marketing growth.
• APAC has 2.14 billion active social media users, accounting for nearly half of all global users. Unsurprising, Social remains the most popular channel in digital marketing, receiving over a quarter of the budget.
• Multi-screening, cited by 51% of survey respondents, is now seen as the most significant consumer behavior, overtaking online commerce (47%) following a slowdown in online shopping as consumers emerge from lockdown.
• Half of APAC marketers are preparing for the advancement of Web 3. A similar number expect the metaverse to significantly impact marketing in 5 years.
• One in five marketers currently use AI and machine learning to drive marketing improvements, but it is the technology expected to have the most impact on marketing in the next 2 years. IDC predicts spending on AI systems to rise from $18 billion in 2022 to $32 billion in 2025.
• A higher proportion of media owners (66%), up from 38% last year, are investing in the capture and analysis of audience data as they look to grow their own first-party data capabilities as they prepare for a cookieless future.
• Although measurement is seen as the biggest obstacle to digital marketing growth, only a small minority of marketers (5%) are focused on employing greater measurement.

Summing up, Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director – Asia Pacific, MMA Global, commented: “With the region’s accelerated digital adoption post-COVID, investing in digital marketing capabilities such as AI, capturing proprietary audience data, better measurement and skill sets, and preparing for Web 3, will give marketers competitive advantage.”

Billingham said, “It is no secret that advertising has always been about attention. For the brands, it is important not just to understand but directly know if their ads are creating attention on their target audience. It’s just now that it can be measured much better in the digital world compared to before with the advantages of eye-tracking and other digital tools. Brands have the opportunity to leverage this once-in-an-era transformation by leading the imperative for marketing change and adopting proven, peer-driven, and scientific best practices, without compromise.”

Importance of the attention economy
80% of the advertisement is now digital, which brings the importance of actual attention on driving sales and brand metrics. Posts, newspaper advertisements have always been an issue. But with digital advertising, there is this assumption that the inventory is infinite. So, you can have as many ads as you like. Thousands, millions, billions of ads are served but lots of serving doesn’t mean that users have looked at it. With ad verification, brands can understand metrics such as valid, viewable, brand-safe, quality.

Measuring attention
Measuring attention is never easy, and verification is important but still, many marketers in many regions don’t use verification tools. With ad verification, brands can understand metrics such as valid, viewable, brand-safe, quality. In terms of effectiveness, a lot of advertisers use media brand lift studies or track panel analysis to engage or measure their campaigns. This allows brands to see which digital advertising they should move with to get a better business impact. If brands stick only to the ad verification and what it gives in terms of ad viewability, that would be one example of the silent measurement. We need to look beyond, to the impact this ad had on the consumer.

Tips for marketers
When the campaign is running in the different digital touchpoints you cannot really confirm if the results of the brand studies you are getting are specifically designated platforms for your video campaigns because the campaign is running on multi-platforms and cross-channels.

Another challenge is scalability. How much of a quick and large access to consumers can brands have to really understand the impact on them and to be able to get the assessment of the campaign impact?

Marketers ultimately want to know what their return on ad spend is going to be with advanced data solutions and customer data platforms being developed. They are actually getting closer to understanding the customer value and or maybe even the customer lifetime value. All advertisers and marketers are thought to be heading in this direction.

The attention metric was not known and could not be measured so far; no one actually knew what kind of actions to take. But now, thanks to companies like Lumen, which can measure attention, brands both know what to do and are aware of consumers' behaviors and reactions. From this point on, it will be important for brands to take action, not just talk about consumer attention anymore.

Watch the full webinar here.             

With the global digital advertising and marketing ecosystem set to become a $646 billion economy by 2024, coupled with the growing rise in ad fraud, brands need to be aware of the complex challenges of brand safety issues online. To help brands with this, the 2021 Brand Safety Report reveals current understanding and perceptions about brand safety and how some of the leading brands across major industries are implementing best practices to protect their brands.

Highlights from the report include:  

• Very few brand custodians are taking brand safety seriously, with nine out of ten CMOs astonished with the results after carrying out an external brand safety audit through external partners. The limited awareness isn’t allowing CMOs to see the short or long-term impact of brand safety challenges.
• The present brand safety guidelines are not aligned with the changing business needs where digital takes center stage. Brands are required to revisit their guidelines and take a digital-first approach.
• The onus of brand safety is ultimately on the brands, not with third-party agencies.
• The standard brand safety configurations available with the advertising platforms are not enough to achieve the desired goals and objectives. Brands must leverage specialized tools and solutions for brand safety for tangible outcomes.
• Brand infringement is increasingly becoming a gateway to brand safety issues. Brands cannot ignore brand infringement challenges which are posing serious threats around integrity and trustworthiness.
• Brand custodians must adopt the best practices to proactively embrace brand safety and strengthen the brand by getting rid of the harmful issues which can result in irreversible damages.

Amit Relan, Co-Founder of mFilterIt, said in a statement, “Fear leads to more fear, and trust leads to more trust and in today’s time of uncertainty, trust is the only silver lining to bank upon. Your customer’s trust in you, their trust in your brand. Brands, including their partners who are responsible for their digital presence, need to take a proactive stance and create a trustworthy and safe environment by ensuring they are not put on the wrong side and associate with something that harms their integrity.”

Chief Analyst and Founder of Techarc Faisal Kawoosa said, “Brand safety is at an inflection point as the world opens for transparency and trustworthiness in the digital world. With digital commerce becoming mainstream and D2C the preferred channel for several business categories, brands need to be certain about the message and mediums they are getting represented through along with the genuine impact that’s getting created.”

Bala Subramaniam, Head – Omnichannel Max Fashion at Landmark Group, said, “In the last two years, the digital ecosystem has seen a massive surge. While this has created a wide array of opportunities, it also has given rise to activities that can be quite brand damaging. From social profile impersonation to fake websites, brand safety issues are growing and becoming quite complex in nature. Brands have to be vigilant and work with partners that can help safeguard the brands. Investing in brand safety tools, technologies, and partners should be a top of the list item for all brand custodians.”

The report shares eye-opening industry findings, expert advice, and key pointers to what brands should be looking out to stay safe online around key topics, such as:

• Adverts can unintentionally pop up next to inappropriate content such as fake news, terrorism, and adult content. This can harm the brand’s reputation and have a larger impact on their ROI in the longer run.
• Mirror websites are being created by fraudsters, which poses a serious financial as well as security threat to brands in e-commerce where scammers manage to get some traffic on these bogus portals to transact resulting in a financial fraud
• Account takeover fraud is another offspring of brand infringement, through which scammers get full control of the accounts of genuine users of an e-commerce service which they then use for various frauds activity.

The report concludes that the industry needs, more than ever, to come together and collaborate in creating a brand-safe environment under which brands across all sectors can flourish, thrive, and add to their brand equity. For a successful online future, brands need to create digitally driven guidelines for brand safety as they intensify their digital transformation initiatives, as well as carry out close continuous monitoring of the goals and objectives outlined in such guiding documents.

In essence, a brand safety issue is not an indicator of poor performance that brand custodians should feel shy of talking about. Instead, proactive checks for brand safety issues will make a brand stronger in the digital landscape.

Pertinent topics such as mobile advertising, digital publishing and influencer marketer were discussed and further analyzed during the Mobile Marketing Association’s annual Impact Forum in Dubai. The forum brought in thought leaders working in-house  at global and regional companies to discuss the transformation of business through mobile.

Among the speakers was Emre Tok, Vice President of Customer Growth, Experience, Digital & Performance Marketing at Careem, who shared how advanced technologies have helped his team grow their reach.

“Careem is dedicated to mobile marketing and heavily invests in core technologies. We have a team of data scientists using cutting-edge machine learning and Artificial Intelligence programs to power our marketing to ensure optimum levels,”  Tok told his audience.

He explained that through the use of prediction and forecasting models, they can define the optimal times and communication content, and with “tailormade value propositions for our customers we are able to drive a 360 marketing campaign with experience driven growth, both online within our app as well as providing a quality service though our Captains.”

The Careem app’s user interface has evolved over the years, building on its CSR partnerships with UNHCR by allowing passengers to collect rewards that can be redeemed for credit to be used for future rides or donated to charitable causes.

The Careem app’s user interface has evolved over the years, building on its CSR partnerships with UNHCR by allowing passengers to collect rewards that can be redeemed for credit to be used for future rides or donated to charitable causes.

Since its 2012 launch, Careem has gained roughly 30 million passengers in 15 regional countries, often employing partnerships to offer promo codes to and from events such as the 2019 MMA Forum itself.

The importance of conducting more transactions on mobile devices was also discussed in another panel, in which Facebook Head of Agencies MENA Ian Manning stated offline retail still dominates in the region.

TELLING A STORY THROUGH MOBILE

Dubai-based Iraqi actor, director and comedian Lowi Sahi shared his journey and explained how brands can best approach the topic of Influencer Marketing. Sahi, who is Director of Sahi Media Production, prefaced his statements by defining himself as a ‘content creator’ rather than an influencer.

“Today we are assimilated to billboards and people dislike how creators are over-selling branded content to the world, but let’s not confuse influencers with content creators. I believe that in each industry you will have affordable and premium goods or services. It all depends on what value it brings to human beings,” said Sahi.

He also shared the back story of how he began creating videos for YouTube in an effort to share Dubai’s sights and sounds with a terminally ill girl in his native Iraq named Zahra who was unable to travel to the UAE herself. The video going viral encouraged Sahi to keep telling impactful stories through videos, as he explained in a “Creators Journeys” video published by YouTube.

“There is no influence without a content creator, no income for a creator without a brand, no easy bridge between them without a talent agency and no correct KPI without analytics,” he told the crowd during the conference.

He added that everyone should remember that content is the number one priority for everyone. “If there is no true and well-told story, there is no audience,” said Sahi.

The distinction between “influencer” and “content creator” was important to make, given the sometimes negative reputation garnered by influencers. Measures by the UAE government have been taken, such as the implementation of an e-media license in 2018 by the National Media Council that was intended to regulate the country’s booming influencer activities. As previously discussed in Communicate, establishments such as restaurants and hotels have gone the length of banning influencers after previous negative experiences with them.

The Mobile Marketing Association returns to Dubai today to host the latest edition of one of its signature events: MMA Impact Forum. The Istanbul-based MENA & Turkey chapter of the global MMA is leading the organization of the annual forum in Dubai that unites marketers from various countries in the Middle East and North Africa to explore regional case studies and opportunities for growth.

Ahead of the Impact Forum, which carries the theme #ShapeTheFuture, MMA EMEA Managing Director Chris Babayode shares with Communicate an overview of MMA’s regional and global initiatives as well as a preview of his presentation at the Forum revealing MMA’s latest scientific neuroscience cognition research related to the ‘One Second Strategy’ for marketers.

Architecting the future

Babayode explained that MMA is aiming much of its energy in the direction of helping the marketing community future-proof itself during a time when technology is rapidly impacting the industry landscape.

“Our key our focus is on ‘Architecting the Future of Marketing.’ How we see that playing out is that there’s an opportunity for us to enlighten marketers to give them a vision into the future, empower them and then enable them to find insights and research that help them grow their business,” said Babayode.

He added that for them architecting the future has manifested itself in the forum. According to him, they want to showcase at the forum the impact that mobile is having on the growth and development of marketing.

Research initiatives 

Along with over 20 events held around the world yearly, MMA concentrates on sharing knowledge through other mediums such as white papers and frequent webinars with its #MMAWebinar series. The latest webinar on April 23rd focused on the “One Second Strategy – Mobile Ads are processed in the blink of an eye” which was the result of MMA’s aforementioned research that will be further discussed during Babayode’s presentation today in Dubai.

“We’ve had requests from MMA members in regard to being able to understand what happens in our brains in a mobile feed environment around messaging, advertising and content. The data from our research showed that our brains are able to process advertising very quickly – in the blink of eye. That makes what marketers do in the first second so crucial,” said Babayode.

Two-thirds of all ads are cognitively recognized at 0.4 seconds! The findings from our #Mobile Cognition Research study suggest that #marketers should develop plans and strategies that address the first one second! What's your #OneSecondStrategy? https://t.co/jSRK53JswH

— Mobile Marketing Association (@MMAglobal) April 8, 2019

2019 and Beyond

Babayode highlighted several acronyms behind the MMA 2019 programs that describe the current challenges and focus of the marketers. He stated that MOSTT (Marketer Organization Structure Think Tank) is of importance: advertisers need to understand what organizational structure they need to take advantage of mobile and digital. Yet, that’s not the only research, or acronym, that he divulged.

“One of our initial findings was that marketers are focused on 4 areas: Mobile, Analytics, Real-Time, Social (MARS). The work we’re doing on the organizational structure through interviews with marketers and their companies focuses on understanding how they can compete in today’s MARS environment,” said Babayode.

He added that later in 2019 MMA will develop a diagnostic tool to help marketers understand their current capabilities and what they’ll need in the future.

“As an organization we find that these challenges, Brand Safety, Attribution and Ad Fraud, Measurement and Attribution (MATT), Branding and Performance marketing, are faced by marketers all around the globe. Therefore, the work we do at MMA is transferrable across regions and these insights are certainly beneficial in MENAT as well.”

The shortlist was selected by the Smarties Pre-Screening Council, which consists of over 100 senior level mobile practitioners and is then judged by a panel of senior marketers and agency professionals headed by Jury Chair, David Lowes, chief marketing officer, Samsung Electronic Europe. Submissions are evaluated against four criteria: strategy, execution, creativity, and results.

Mediavest | Spark, alongside Getty Images and Project We Forgot, a digital support community catering to the younger generation of Alzheimer’s caregivers, designed the month-long, Snapchat-focused campaign was primarily designed for World Alzheimer’s Day (September 21). The campaign featured ‘snaps’ illustrating the disease through family photos that will disappear in a few seconds, much like the effect of the disease on memories. The closing message reads: “Alzheimer’s Erases Your Memories, Let’s Erase Alzheimer’s”.

Since the campaign was targeted at the younger generation, mobile as a channel made perfect sense. “Youth today are generally apathetic and indifferent to health related issues such as Alzheimer’s. Just talking to them could be deemed as preachy and wouldn’t cut through. We needed to find a way where we could show them the effects of Alzheimer’s as well as speak their language,” says Mohit Lodha, regional director of human experience, Mediavest | Spark. Furthermore, the growing popularity of Snapchat in the UAE and its ephemeral nature, which works just like the disease itself, made it the obvious choice.

While the results of the campaign remain ambiguous due to the lack of Snapchat analytics and the fact that it was a zero budget campaign, the agency has estimated a total reach of 88,000 on Snapchat and Instagram. The organic growth and awareness generated by the campaign came thanks to its amplification on not just Snapchat, but also Instagram through influencers, film personalities and local media.

Commenting on the shortlist, Lodha says, “We are delighted shortlisted for the EMEA smarties. Smarties celebrate the best in class in mobile creativity and innovation and we are honored to be amongst the best. We are looking forward to awards ceremony in November.”