Michael Campbell, Regional Head of Strategy, Initiative MENATIt’s 4:30pm on a Friday. The Sonos is playing Raye in the background, and a couple of planners are discussing Supersnake’s next set at Sirene. I make a mental note: Next time I head to J1 Beach – book early; I’m not begging for an available pool bed again. The daze breaks. The growth team walks in, folder in hand and a slight smile. New brief in. Awareness campaign in KSA and UAE. AED 500k. They want the presentation next Thursday. Raye fades to a faint tinnitus ring. The beach will have to wait.
It’s a familiar scene. The brief arrives late, urgent, open-ended: ‘awareness’, ‘UAE and KSA’, ‘500k budget’. Somewhere between the WhatsApp thread, the email chain and the deck that circulates through five different hands, the real purpose of the brief gets lost.
And I find myself asking – why do you want awareness? Why impressions, clicks, viewability, CPA or lands? This, I’d argue, is the broken brief: hurried, non-specific and fixated on the journey rather than the destination.
“Wouldn’t it be far more powerful to have agencies briefed on how brand and performance media work together to drive bottom-line impact rather than templated awareness objectives.”
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The broken brief
“Things move quickly in MENA,” I was told before packing my bags in Europe. True – the velocity here is unmatched. But as the adage goes, you can only ever have two of the three: quick, cheap or good.
Agencies and brands alike face constant price pressure, and the trade-off is nearly always speed versus quality. There’s no world in which we can have all three – yet in the rush to deliver faster, we’ve normalised a culture where the brief itself becomes collateral damage.
At its core, this isn’t about media or metrics. Media is the means, not the mission. It’s about the customer, full stop.
We spend our days buried in dashboards, supplier meetings and creative reviews, often losing sight of the only thing that matters: the outcome for the customer and the business. When that Monday-morning meeting rolls around with the CFO, are they really asking for awareness or viewability? Of course not. They care about sales, share and sustainable growth.
So why don’t we brief for growth instead? Growth in category penetration. Growth in lifetime value. Growth in portfolio margin.
Wouldn’t it be far more powerful to have agencies briefed on how brand and performance media work together to drive bottom-line impact rather than templated awareness objectives we’ve all seen a hundred times before?
The consultative partnership
“You’re going to scare them with those numbers,” a colleague joked as I built a brand-growth funnel slide. He was probably right, but I carried on.
Growth diagnostics should be the baseline, not a nice-to-have. Clients often ask for media metrics; few ask for growth architecture. Yet, in an age of AI, modelled measurement, efficiency savings and offshoring, strategic value must come from tangible commercial connection.
Unified audience analytics now gives us single-customer-view clarity from multiple, once-fragmented datasets. The opportunity exists but without disciplined application, it becomes just another pile of insights gathering dust.
I’ve seen what happens when a brief shifts focus, from metrics to outcomes. A regional retail brand reframed its first half (H1) brand planning from “driving consideration” to “full funnel acquisition efficiency”.
Within three months, reallocating just 15 per cent of media spend towards high-lifetime value (LTV) segments, away from low-cost gross rating points (GRP), high-reach tactics, reduced account level customer acquisition cost (CAC) by 18 per cent with forecasts showing annual customer value up by 11 per cent. That’s growth you can brief for, measure and defend in a boardroom.
A better brief
The growth team walk in again with the same folder, but this time eyes bright. It’s a retailer running 5,000 creative assets a week, struggling with penetration and product prioritisation. They want to grow category share 20 per cent. They’ve shared ad-account access, brand health data, indexed sales and product performance.
We’ve got six weeks to build the response. Kick-off is on Monday with research, data, planning and activation in the room.
There’s real scope here to drive scale and be their growth consultants, and while the activation team can talk media metrics to their heart’s content, you can be sure I won’t mention them once.
And yes, I finally booked that beach bed.
By Michael Campbell, Regional Head of Strategy, Initiative MENAT
