Proof Before Placement

Gulf Retail Media Growth Is Outpacing Measurement. Here is why proof now matters more than placement in the Gulf.

Every advertiser has heard the pitch. A retail platform has millions of shoppers, a stream of first-party data, and placements sitting right beside the moment of purchase. It sounds almost unfair, in the best way. And the money is following. NIQ reported this year that 67 percent of chief marketing officers plan to increase retail media investment in 2026. Yet only 53 percent believe the networks they buy from offer measurement good enough to prove reliable incrementality. Budgets are moving ahead of proof, and that gap is where the next few years of Gulf retail media will be decided.

Ambition Across the Region

The region is not short on ambition. In July, ADNOC Distribution launched Engage, a network built on nearly 700,000 daily customers, more than 250 million annual transactions and 2.7 million rewards members. Majid Al Futtaim's Precision Media, launched in 2024, works across its Carrefour estate, including 212 digital screens in 25 UAE hypermarkets offered through a partnership with Publicis. The group says that network reaches more than six million unique customers. Noon says over 10,000 brands and sellers now advertise on its platform. These are serious assets with real data behind them.

Scale Creates Its Own Question

But scale creates its own question. As more inventory arrives, much of it inside physical stores, advertisers need to compare what they are buying across networks and trust that the numbers mean the same thing. Right now, they often cannot. Definitions of an attributed sale, an audience or an incremental result can differ from one network to the next. A brand running campaigns across three environments can end up holding three reports written in three different dialects.

This is the problem Munzir Bukhari has been thinking about for most of his career. Now Senior Manager, Retail Media (Commercial) at HungerStation in Riyadh, he built his view of the industry from both sides of the table. First he joined the founding team at Spike Media, where he sat between consumer goods advertisers and the retailers trying to serve them. Now he works inside a major commerce platform. What he saw repeatedly was uneven measurement, unclear ownership, and handoffs between product, data, commercial and campaign teams that nobody had designed on purpose.

Data Without a Business Question

His diagnosis is blunt. "One of the biggest lessons in Retail Media is that data without a business question is just information." Plenty of organisations sit on enormous volumes of data and still struggle to decide what to do with it. Measurement, in his view, should not exist because another metric fits on a dashboard. It should reduce uncertainty.

That starts with asking what a campaign is actually meant to change. Bukhari argues the biggest mistake brands make is starting with the placement instead of the objective. The conversation should not open with a banner or sponsored search. It should open with whether the brand wants new shoppers, bigger baskets, better conversion or a defended category share. Once that is clear, the right media almost designs itself. Sponsored products capture existing intent, display and video build discovery, CRM brings people back, and off-site activation carries commerce audiences beyond the app.

Beyond Immediate ROAS

The second mistake follows from the first. Treating immediate return on ad spend as the only scorecard can make a campaign look efficient while it fails the bigger commercial task. "The question should not simply be, 'Did the ad perform?'" he says. "It should be, 'Did the investment help move the business objective we agreed to solve?'" Retail media sits so close to commerce that weak fundamentals undermine the advertising itself. If the product is out of stock, the price is uncompetitive or the creative ignores the shopping mission, no placement can rescue it.

Closed-loop environments do offer something traditional media never could. Reach, impressions and clicks still matter, but a commerce platform can go further and ask whether customers actually bought, which products moved, whether existing customers were reached or new ones acquired, and whether shopping behaviour changed. As measurement matures, the conversation can move toward repeat purchase, category behaviour and incrementality, which is the question of what would not have happened without the advertising. That last idea is exactly where confidence is thinnest, which is why it matters most.

Closing the Measurement Gap

So what closes the gap? Not a single technology. The industry needs shared definitions, so an advertiser can read two networks' reports side by side. It needs clear ownership inside platforms, so someone is accountable when a number looks wrong. It needs operational reliability, because reporting that arrives late or inconsistently erodes trust faster than a weak campaign. And it needs proposition discipline. Bukhari offers a useful test. A weak proposition says, "Here is our inventory." A strong one says, "Here is the business problem we can help solve, the shopper behaviour behind it, the capabilities we can activate, and how we will evaluate the outcome."

There is an encouraging way to read all this. The Gulf's retail media infrastructure is young. Unlike markets that must retrofit measurement onto networks built years ago, the region has a chance to build shared standards while the market is still forming. The networks that treat proof as a product, not an afterthought, will be the ones advertisers trust with their next budget.

Budgets are already moving. The only open question is whether the evidence will catch up before patience runs out.