By: Claude Sonnet 4.5
When Majid Al Futtaim announced its partnership with Advertima in May 2025, the headlines focused on artificial intelligence and in-store screens. But the real story was quieter and more consequential. Carrefour hypermarkets across the United Arab Emirates were rolling out visual-spatial sensors capable of identifying shopper profiles in real time and serving tailored messages through digital displays. The move marked a turning point for a channel that had long been dismissed as trade marketing’s digital cousin. Commerce media had arrived in MENA not as an experiment but as infrastructure.
Globally, commerce media is projected to surpass total television advertising revenue in 2025, reaching approximately $178 billion and claiming just over fifteen percent of total global advertising spend, according to WPP Media’s year-end forecast. The Middle East is following a parallel trajectory, though at a compressed pace. What took Western markets a decade to build is unfolding here in less than half that time, driven by a collision of high smartphone penetration, rapid e-commerce adoption, and a regulatory environment increasingly focused on data sovereignty. For marketing teams across the Gulf Cooperation Council and North Africa, the channel represents both an operational challenge and a strategic imperative that cannot be deferred.
The Infrastructure Is Already Being Built
Commerce media extends well beyond sponsored product placements on e-commerce platforms. It encompasses the full ecosystem of advertising inventory controlled by retailers and commerce-enabled companies, spanning onsite placements, offsite programmatic activations, in-store digital screens, and loyalty-driven targeting. In MENA, that ecosystem is being assembled with unusual speed. The Interactive Advertising Bureau MENA Retail Media Task Force released market-specific guides in January 2025, mapping out the regional landscape across the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The guides identified not only the platforms, but the data management infrastructure required to operate at scale, signaling that commerce media had moved from exploratory to operational.
Amazon launched its demand-side platform in Saudi Arabia in 2021, allowing both endemic and non-endemic brands to build video and display campaigns targeting first-party audiences across Amazon’s properties, including its entertainment platforms. The platform enables brands to reach consumers based on behavioral data derived from purchase history, browsing patterns, and engagement with Amazon services, then drive traffic either to Amazon storefronts or direct-to-consumer sites. Noon, the region’s largest homegrown e-commerce platform, has similarly developed advertising capabilities that allow brands to target users across its marketplace and app environments. Carrefour, through Majid Al Futtaim’s Precision Media network, is now bridging online and offline commerce, creating a unified advertising layer that spans hypermarket visits and e-commerce transactions.
The technical architecture behind these networks matters more than the inventory itself. Precision Media’s integration with Advertima allows for real-time audience recognition without relying on personally identifiable information, using visual-spatial data to infer shopper profiles such as families, young professionals, or value-focused buyers. Those profiles then inform which creative assets are served on in-store digital screens, creating a feedback loop between physical behavior and digital messaging. The technology is not novel globally, but its deployment at scale within a major regional retail network represents a significant infrastructural shift. Publicis Groupe Middle East formalized this shift in October 2025 through a partnership with LiveRamp, enabling data collaboration between brands and retailers through privacy-safe identifiers. The partnership aims to make commerce media accessible to mid-market advertisers by reducing technical barriers and providing standardized measurement frameworks.
The Economics Are Forcing Budget Reallocation
Commerce media’s rapid adoption in MENA is not driven primarily by novelty but by economic pressure. Performance marketing on social platforms and search engines has become prohibitively expensive during peak shopping periods, with cost-per-click rates climbing as competition intensifies. Commerce media offers a structural advantage: it reaches consumers at the point of purchase intent, using first-party data that bypasses third-party tracking limitations. Brands are not experimenting with commerce media as a complementary channel; they are shifting budget share because the return on advertising spend is demonstrably higher when measured against closed-loop sales attribution.
In Saudi Arabia, retail media spending is projected to reach five billion Saudi riyals by the end of the decade, driven in part by Vision 2030’s digital transformation initiatives and the Kingdom’s substantial e-commerce investments. The country’s online sales are forecast to exceed fifty billion riyals by 2025, representing thirteen percent of total retail revenue, up from nine percent penetration today. That growth is creating a flywheel effect: as more consumer transactions move online, more first-party data becomes available, which in turn makes commerce media placements more valuable to advertisers. The UAE market, already more mature in e-commerce adoption, is projected to reach $9.2 billion in online commerce by 2026, providing a robust foundation for commerce media expansion.
Industry practitioners in the region report that brands are reallocating close to thirty percent of their budgets to retail and commerce media networks, a figure that would have seemed implausible two years ago. This reallocation is not coming from experimental or innovation budgets but from core performance channels, including paid social and programmatic display. The shift reflects a recognition that commerce media solves a measurement problem that has plagued digital advertising for years: the inability to definitively link ad exposure to incremental sales. Retailers control both the media environment and the transaction data, enabling closed-loop attribution that can isolate the sales impact of individual campaigns. That capability is especially valuable in markets like MENA, where media fragmentation and walled-garden platforms have historically made cross-channel measurement difficult.
The Operational Challenges Are Not Trivial
Despite rapid growth, commerce media remains operationally complex, particularly in regions where the ecosystem is still maturing. MENA marketers face fragmentation across platforms, inconsistent measurement standards, and limited interoperability between retail media networks. Each major retailer operates its own technology stack with distinct reporting interfaces, campaign management tools, and attribution methodologies. Brands running campaigns across Amazon, Noon, and Carrefour must navigate three separate systems, each with different data formats and performance metrics. This fragmentation creates inefficiencies that offset some of the channel’s targeting advantages.
Measurement remains the most persistent challenge. While commerce media networks can provide closed-loop attribution for onsite transactions, they struggle to capture the full customer journey, particularly when conversions happen offline or through competitor channels. A consumer might encounter a sponsored product ad on Noon, research the product on social media, and ultimately purchase it in a physical store. Current attribution models would miss that sequence entirely, crediting the sale to the final touchpoint rather than the initial exposure. Regional practitioners emphasize the need for education around incrementality measurement, which uses control groups and statistical modeling to isolate the true sales lift attributable to advertising, rather than relying on last-click attribution that may simply capture existing demand.
The distinction between onsite and offsite commerce media adds another layer of complexity. Onsite placements appear within the retailer’s owned properties, offering high purchase intent but limited reach. Offsite placements extend campaigns to external platforms like Meta, TikTok, or Google Display Network, using retailer data for targeting while reaching consumers beyond the marketplace environment. According to eMarketer, forty-two percent of commerce media growth through 2025 will come from offsite campaigns, reflecting advertiser demand for scale. However, offsite activations require sophisticated data collaboration infrastructure and raise questions about match rates between platforms and the accuracy of cross-platform targeting. Publicis Groupe Middle East’s partnership with LiveRamp directly addresses this gap by creating interoperable data frameworks that allow brands to activate retailer data across multiple channels while maintaining privacy compliance.
The maturity gap between MENA markets also creates strategic complexity. The UAE’s commerce media ecosystem is relatively advanced, with established platforms, sophisticated measurement capabilities, and advertisers comfortable with programmatic buying. Saudi Arabia is developing rapidly but remains in an earlier stage, with infrastructure being built and advertiser education still underway. Egypt’s commerce media landscape is nascent, centered primarily around Jumia Egypt and localized platforms with limited reach and rudimentary targeting capabilities. Brands operating across the region cannot deploy a uniform commerce media strategy; they must tailor activation, measurement, and creative execution to match each market’s technical maturity and consumer behavior.
What Marketing Teams Should Be Asking Now
The strategic questions around commerce media are no longer about whether to participate but how to allocate resources, build capabilities, and manage trade-offs. Marketing teams should begin by auditing current commerce media exposure across all active retail partnerships. Many brands are already running campaigns on platforms like Amazon or Noon without a unified view of performance, budget allocation, or strategic alignment. Consolidating that view is a prerequisite for informed decision-making.
The next question involves measurement infrastructure. Brands should evaluate whether they have access to clean, integrated data that links commerce media exposure to sales outcomes across both online and offline channels. This requires collaboration between marketing, trade, and analytics teams, as well as investment in marketing mix modeling or incrementality testing frameworks that can isolate true advertising impact. Without robust measurement, commerce media risks becoming another cost center rather than a performance driver.
Budget allocation must be considered in the context of broader media strategy. Commerce media should not be treated as a standalone channel but as part of an integrated ecosystem that includes search, social, and brand-building media. The question is not whether to shift budget into commerce media but where that budget should come from and what trade-offs are acceptable. Brands focused on lower-funnel conversion may find that reallocating spend from paid social to commerce media delivers better return on investment. Brands with longer consideration cycles and brand-building objectives may need to balance commerce media with upper-funnel channels that drive awareness and consideration before purchase intent activates.
For brands still in the testing phase, the focus should be on platform selection and creative optimization. Not all commerce media networks deliver equivalent value. Brands should prioritize platforms with high traffic, sophisticated targeting capabilities, transparent reporting, and technical support. Creative execution matters more in commerce media than in many other channels because the environment is inherently commercial. Consumers on retail platforms are in a buying mindset, which means creative assets must balance product information, brand differentiation, and conversion triggers without feeling overly promotional. Testing different creative approaches, messaging strategies, and call-to-action formats is essential to understanding what drives performance within each platform’s environment.
Brands ready to scale should invest in partnerships and technology infrastructure. Commerce media at scale requires cross-functional collaboration between marketing, trade, e-commerce, and merchandising teams. It also requires technology that can automate campaign management, integrate data across platforms, and provide unified reporting. Many regional brands are partnering with agencies or technology providers to build this infrastructure rather than developing it in-house. The partnership model allows brands to access specialized expertise while maintaining strategic control over budget allocation and campaign objectives.
Competitive positioning is another critical consideration. As commerce media becomes a larger share of the advertising ecosystem, brands that move early gain advantage in securing premium placements, building platform relationships, and accumulating performance data. Late movers will find themselves competing for inventory in an increasingly crowded and expensive environment. The window for building commerce media capabilities at relatively low cost is narrowing, particularly in high-growth markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia where advertiser demand is accelerating.
Risk management should also be part of the strategic conversation. Commerce media concentrates significant budget with a small number of retail partners, creating dependency risk. If a retailer’s platform experiences technical issues, policy changes, or competitive shifts, brands with heavy exposure may face disruption. Diversification across multiple commerce media networks and maintaining balance with other performance channels can mitigate this risk. Brands should also consider contractual terms around data ownership, reporting transparency, and campaign flexibility to ensure they retain control over their advertising investments.
The channel is moving too quickly for wait-and-see strategies. Brands that treat commerce media as a future consideration rather than a present reality will find themselves at a structural disadvantage as competitors build capabilities, capture market share, and establish platform relationships. The question is not whether commerce media will become a core component of MENA’s advertising infrastructure but whether individual brands will be positioned to capitalize on that shift or scramble to catch up.