Every time a crisis hits, a recession, a regional conflict, a pandemic, an economic shock, the same reflex plays out on spending across boardrooms in Dubai, Riyadh, Cairo, and everywhere else. Someone says: “Let’s pause the marketing budget.” It feels rational. It feels responsible. It is, in almost every measurable way, the wrong call.
I have spent enough years in this industry to watch brands make this mistake and pay for it. Not immediately, because the short-term P&L can actually look better when you go dark, but a year later, two years later, when the recovery arrives and they find themselves invisible in a marketplace that moved on without them.
What the evidence has always told us
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