More than 150 industry leaders gathered for a morning of insightful keynotes, informative panel discussions, productive networking, as well as high-profile meet-and-greets at the Campaign Breakfast Briefing: The Future is now event held at the Grand Plaza Mövenpick in Media City on Friday, 13 September.
The event, which turned the spotlight to “futuristic” themes claiming their space in the present within the realm of brand, marketing, creative and advertising, began with a welcome speech by Nadeem Quraishi, Publisher at Campaign Middle East.
Welcome speech
Quraishi offered an overview of Campaign Middle East‘s latest print edition, the editorial calendar for the year ahead, the events schedule for the brand in 2024, as well as the upcoming Athar – Saudi Festival of Creativity in November 2024, and the highly anticipated Agency of the Year Awards in December 2024.
He also shared details on the sponsors and event partners, including gold sponsors MiQ, Pixis and Publicis Groupe, as well as associate sponsor Cheil.
Chair’s opening remarks at Campaign Breakfast Briefing
Campaign Middle East Editor Anup Oommen then stepped up to offer the chair’s opening remarks, setting the scene for an eventful morning of keynotes and panel discussions.
In his speech, Oommen dissected Google’s third-party cookie pendulum, first-party data and clean rooms, the very real concerns around brand safety and ad fraud, the shift from creativity to creative effectiveness, and the move towards better pricing, measurement, and outcome-based models.
He also touched upon the untapped opportunities within Connected TV, brand integrations, and omnichannel, the ever-evolving search and user behaviour trends, and the need to address skills gap in the present, before focusing on the future.
Keynote presentation – The future of digital advertising is now
Wassim Mneimneh, the Managing Director at MiQ MENAT, kicked the official event off with a keynote speech, offering deep dive into the future of digital advertising, talking about data signals, the growing opportunity within Connected TV and YouTube, and the ‘destroyer’ and creator that is AI.
“We’re getting better TV data every single day, which is helping us understand audience behaviour more clearly everyday. In parallel, there’s a rapidly growing supply of streaming TV inventory in the region. This is where it gets exciting. When you buy inventory programmatically, we unlock powerful capabilities. For starters, we can apply frequency capping; we don’t have to bombard our users. We also steer budgets towards targeting specific apps, regions, and even particular audience segments that may have been missed by traditional TV,” Mneimneh said during his keynote.
Mneimneh concluded the speech saying, “Change is the only constant and it’s happening at a 100 miles an hour. When change comes, it brings new opportunities with it, as well.”
Panel – Holistic search advertising in the modern era
The first panel sessions, conducted in partnership with Publicis Groupe, highlighted the evolution of search and user behavior in our modern era, and how it has evolved from simple, isolated channels to a more diversified and sophisticated ecosystem.
Moderated by Publicis Media’s Vanessa Abi Faris, the panel welcomed on stage Google Ads’ Marie de Ducla, Amazon Ads’ Wassim El Jammal, Nestlé MENA’s Utku Hasdemir, and Publicis Media’s Richard Hartley, who shared interesting details on how search and user behaviour has evolved in an ecosystem that has welcomed voice, image, and ChatGPT driven searches.
Taking an example from the beauty industry, Wassim El Jammal, Amazon Ads’ Head of Agency Development – MENAT, said, “Customers currently come to Amazon to look for ingredients, not just products or brands. They search for glycolic acid, vitamin C serums etc. These kind of insights are extremely important to us, because 0- per cent of the customers who come on Amazon start their journey from the search bar. So, as a customer-obsessed company, this helps us evolve our search proposition to move beyond just promoting a certain product to promoting multiple brands and products, as well as their ingredients, while enabling video as part of our search proposition to cater to these needs.”
Nestlé MENA’s Head of Digital Utku Hasdemir, said, “I think an integrated or holistic approach to search and user behaviour optimises all aspects of a brand’s online presence, maximising visibility, engagement, and convergence across search engines and media platforms. With AI gathering and analysing vast amounts of consumer data, it allows us to gain deeper understanding of consumer preferences, informing our search strategies, and ultimately helping us deliver more targeted, personalised, and relevant campaigns.”
Richard Hartley, Head of Paid Search at Publicis Media, said, “I think because there are so many different ways that people can search, beyond just text-based searches nowadays, but also with images, voice, and even ChatGPT prompts that people are becoming comfortable with using. So, as a starting point, on an operational front, just getting these into an interface that can help us look at this data, analyse it, and potentially automate from would be a good step. So, now, we’ve got tools that take that SEO data, paid search data, put it into an interface together, and then start making decisions based on it: I think that’s the starting point for innovation.”
Marie de Ducla, Sales Lead – Retail, Travel, Government, Consumer Goods & Services at Google Ads, said, “It’s not just important to optimise search and user behaviour; it’s critical. As consumers become multimodal in their searches – across text, voice, images, and Generative AI tools like Gemini – it’s important for brands also to become multimodal. Maggi, from Nestle, is a great example, not only because of the richness of their content, but also how they position their stories, recipes, interactive content – whether it’s on their brand website or its YouTube channel. This is so important because while e-commerce is booming, and it’s going to continue booming for consumer goods, we still have a staggering 92 per cent of sales that are made offline. So, people need to keep your brand top of mind offline when they’re making that purchase, so optimising your channels and capitalising on them online is so important to be retail ready.”
The panel also delved into how the amalgamation of the right bidding strategies, creative, content and more with the right AI, ML, and analytics tools is not only resulting in much more effective campaigns but also enhancing user experience.
Keynote – Can AI make a marketeer’s life easier?
Next on stage, Neel Pandya, Pixis CEO – EMEA & APAC shared down-to-earth ways in which AI can make a marketeer’s life easier.
After showing examples of ads created 100 per cent by AI in barely any time, Pandya broke down some myths, “The biggest myth is AI will replace humans. No. Humans with AI experience will replace humans who do not have AI experience. Second myth: AI takes time to integrate. No. We are able to do it in less than 30 minutes. Third myth: AI is a black box. No. We are 100 per cent transparent about how we use AI.”
Panel – How AI can help digital marketeers improve performance
Pandya then moderated a high energy panel with Turbostart’s Ravi Rao, Omnicom Media Group (MENA)’s Christos Solomi, Platformance.io’s Waseem Afzal, Digital Rocket’s Tamer A., and Stellantis Middle East & Africa’s Viral Patel on how AI and the algorithms of today are not just shaping our routines but are sculpting the very essence of tomorrow’s reality.
The panel answered the day-to-day marketers questions, including how AI can help you get more qualified leads, and how it can help marketers reach the right audience – thus going beyond time-saving and efficiency measures, to also become extremely effective. The panel also raised an interesting question: If AI can boost sales by 10 per cent to 15 per cent, then why not invest 5 per cent, if it means growing the business even more?
Viral Patel, Head of Media, Stellantis MEA, said, “When it comes to marketing, honestly it’s a given that AI has to be incorporated for the full funnel. Whether you talk about research and insights, any kind of predictive modeling that happens via Einstein AI within Salesforce, creative AI to build ads, gathering leads through performance AI, then nurturing those leads with lead scoring mechanisms before creating customers through engagement. We’ve also started asking questions such as: How do we leverage Gen AI for contact centers to automate their scripts based on user history before going down the funnel to test drive and sales. Then comes the after sales, where we have chatbots following up for service and parts reminders. So AI is teaching us both from a customer acquisition as well as a customer journey point of view.”
Ravi Rao, Founding Partner & CEO, Turbostart MEA, said, “I would recommend every single agency to look at tech startups working with AI, as they can deliver amazing results. Even if it’s as simple as budget automation across platforms, there are so many companies that don’t capitalise on it. But here’s a more interesting point I want to make: If we as individuals, don’t use any of the Generative AIs on our own, we are only going to be talking about definitions and theory, without actually benefitting from it. It’s good to see that in the agency ecosystem, there is a much larger percentage – almost one-third of the employees in agencies – are actually touching, feeling, innovating, and trying to experiment with new AI products and services, but the vast majority have no clue.”
Chris Solomi, Chief Digital Officer, Omnicom Media Group, said, “The creative piece is what Generative AI is really changing. So, if you work in production or content creation, there are tons of used cases. But in media, we want insights, we want to help with planning and buying, and most of the AI that we’re using is what we’ve been using for 3-4 years; the underlying technology is the same. However, the insights bit has really changed. When we put Gen AI assistants in the hands of our planners and in the insights part of the planning phase, they can ask it questions and it will output really, really interesting insight that help with the next stage of the planning process.”
Tamer Alphonse, Co-Founder & Managing Director, Digital Rocket, said, “There are still a lot of pain points for marketers, and this is where I believe AI platforms can step in and complement what digital natives are doing. For example, Google or Meta is handling bid and budget management well within their own ecosystem. But imagine, if you zoom out, and you have an AI that can cross-platform integrate across TikTok, Meta, Snapchat, and automatically help marketers to manage all their campaigns from a single dashboard seamlessly, allowing for data-led decisions on campaigns in real-time. This will not only allow for cross-platform optimisation from one campaign to another, but also from one platform to another. This could be a breakthrough because AI will assist with insights from all platforms and we will be able to handle proper budgeting, planning, forecasting, and campaign management.”
Waseem Afzal, CEO & Founder, Platformance, said, “If there’s one North Star that hasn’t changed over the decades, it’s the need to grow; that’s the bottom line, right? We ask ourselves, how do we continue to remain obsessed with delivering on metrics that matter the most? And for us, the application of AI needs to be contextualised to our mandate to our advertisers. So, whether we use one AI tool or 10 AI tools, it all boils down to how does it impact against the metrics that matter most to the advertisers.”
After the keynotes and panels at the Campaign Breakfast Briefing: The Future is Now event, delegates stayed back for a morning of networking, collaborating, engaging with ideas, learning, and brainstorming together.
For those of you who were unable to attend this stellar gathering of like-minded leaders shaping the top trends and addressing the top challenges in the industry, keep an eye out for the YouTube video of the entire event.
Mark you calendars. Campaign Middle East‘s next event, the Campaign Saudi Briefing 2024: Media and Marketing, will be held on 17 October at the Sheraton Riyadh Hotel & Towers in Saudi Arabia.
