From top left, clockwise, Amina Taher, CMO, Wio Bank; Natalie Shardan, Managing Partner, Serviceplan Middle East; Megan French-Ritsch, Executive Director Marketing, PIF Confidential; George Yaryura, SVP Marketing, Mashreq; and Sidhanth Gopishetty, General Manager, Fung GroupMarketers have stated that artificial intelligence (AI), emotional intelligence within leadership, as well as marketing craft: finding the balance between short-term performance metrics and long-term brand-building remain their top areas of focus, according to the latest CMO Barometer research released in March 2025.
The CMO Barometer is an annual study that surveys top marketers and is conducted by Serviceplan Group Middle East and The Marketing Society in partnership with The Institute of Marketing and Customer Insight at the University of St. Gallen (HSG).
In 2025, this survey took into consideration the opinions of thousands of respondents across the EMEA region, but the CMO Barometer is still building up its responses in the Middle East by engaging with senior marketers across the region.
As part of this exercise, The Marketing Society and Serviceplan Group Middle East hosted an hour-long session titled Leading the Conversation moderated by Alasdair Hall-Jones, Global Director of The Marketing Society, and attended by five senior marketers, including:
- Amina Taher, CMO, Wio Bank
- George Yaryura, SVP Marketing, Mashreq
- Sidhanth Gopishetty, General Manager, Fung Group
- Megan French-Ritsch, Executive Director Marketing, PIF Confidential, and
- Natalie Shardan, Managing Partner, Serviceplan Middle East
1. Effectiveness of AI-first strategies
Marketers delve into speed-to-market, automation and efficiencies
Mashreq’s George Yaryura got the conversation going by sharing his thoughts on the proliferation of AI and its impact on the industry.
George Yaryura said, “AI helps with campaigns: to help generate creative assets and enhance productivity. With the rise of social media, and the rapid acceleration in speed to market, we need to look at two things: firstly, we need to make sure that we still differentiate our brand with these AI-based creative assets, so it doesn’t become too generic. Secondly, we need to upskill all our teams on how to prompt AI better to generate true value.”
Wio Bank’s Amina Taher shared, “At Wio, we use AI throughout our digital banking platform to make banking better for everyone. Beyond creating our images and keeping our communications consistent, we’ve put smart AI systems to work behind the scenes. These systems automatically watch over our digital infrastructure, boost our security, cut costs, and keep everything running smoothly.”
The leaders also discussed how within the business-to-business (B2B) banking sector, marketers are leveraging AI for data modelling and data analysis.
Heading Marketing for Mashreq’s Corporate and Investment Banking, George Yaryura explained, “Within B2B marketing – specifically, within financial services and wholesale banking – it is all about account-based marketing, which calls for hyper-personalisation and very targeted campaigns. Interestingly, there’s a lot of transactional data that had not been used historically. But now, we’re seeing a rapid – and radical – transformation because we’re now tapping into that data modelling and propensity modelling using AI. From that data, we’re able to draw insights and implement hyper-targeted and hyper-personalised campaigns.”
That said, Yaryura added that marketers are barely scratching the surface. “I don’t think we’ve seen the full extent of AI’s impact yet,” he said.
Personalisation at scale and deep customer insights
Building on the conversation, other marketers at the round table discussion also shared their viewpoints on how AI is enabling hyper-targeted campaigns that deliver highly personalised experiences.
Sharing the first-hand benefits that Serviceplan Middle East’s clients and agency staff have experienced from its very own generative AI (Gen AI) tool, Natalie Shardan said, “One of the key aspects that AI is helping with is personalisation at scale. This is what will drive better engagement and better return on investment. This means that, regardless of the AI tool that we use to generate assets, storytelling will be key to success.”
She added, “AI-powered automation, driven by tools such as agentic AI, have helped us streamline our work, and deliver creative and customer service functions faster and more efficiently. It’s also helped our clients gain deeper insights into the customer behaviours, enabling far more accurate forecasting and real-time decision making. The tools that we have developed internally have helped us dive into richer customer data and enable seamless customer experiences, which lead to smarter and more effective strategies.”
Beyond the impact of AI on personalisation, marketers also discussed its effectiveness in terms of segmentation, customer relationship management (CRM) and targeted communication.
Sidhanth Gopishetty used the example of ‘play patterns’ to describe how Toys”R”Us Asia (Part of the Fung Group) has leveraged AI within the toys industry.
He said, “A play pattern refers to how a child plays with a toy. For instance, if you give a child two blocks or two cars, what are they likely to do with it? Traditional play patterns would tell us that they’re likely to stack them on top of each other or drag them along any available surface. But in today’s world, kids are not playing with only physical toys anymore. It’s all digital or, at least, all the toys have some digital component. Hence, we started using AI to explore how we can predict these new ‘play patterns.’ We’ve had some success with this, and we’ve shared these findings with leading toy brands across the world”
Marketers at the round table also discussed ways to leverage generative AI tools for co-creation, to streamline briefs and communication with agencies, and to upskill and learn at pace – especially given that the more technical and financial aspects of joint ventures, M&As etc. are increasingly becoming a part of a CMOs role.
Marketers discuss co-creating ‘a conscious destination’
During the discussion, the industry leaders also agreed that the impact of AI goes far beyond automation and efficiency to also encompass how Middle East destinations are marketed and operated. They said that AI will require marketers – and the agencies supporting them – to relearn a lot about marketing and consumer behaviour, especially given the paradigm shift caused by its inputs and insights.
Heading Marketing & Brand for one of PIF’s Confidential Projects, Megan French-Ritsch explained, “AI’s impact in tourism isn’t just about automation or efficiency—it’s about fundamentally reshaping how we create, market, and operate destinations before a single traveller arrives. One of the most groundbreaking applications of AI and tourism is what we refer to as pre-experiences – where you’ve got AI-generated digital environments and immersive environments that allow travellers to explore, customise and, even, co-create their travel itineraries before setting foot in a destination.
French-Ritsch added, “This fundamentally changes how destinations compete—it’s not just about what’s on offer, but about who offers the most compelling AI-powered pre-travel journey.”
She also went on to discuss the concept of a ‘conscious destination’.
“AI has enabled us to create tourism destinations that learn and evolve—a concept I call the “conscious destination.” Unlike traditional tourism, where destinations respond to visitor needs, AI-infused tourism offerings anticipate, adapt, and self-optimize based on real-time visitor flows, behavior, and even sentiment analysis,” French-Ritsch said.
2. Emotional intelligence and leadership
The conversation then pivoted to how industry leaders are honing their emotional intelligence skills and how much of this exercise is driven by the changing attitudes of younger generations within the workforce.
Wio Bank’s Taher said, “Emotional intelligence – including managing people, upwards, downwards and sideways – is 50 percent of what we do, while the technical skills, our knowledge and everything else, accounts for the remaining 50 percent.”
Taher also alluded to the importance of emotional intelligence in a male-dominated industry, sharing from experience how it has guided her communication strategies, relationships with her co-workers, and her learning curve stating that “it helps you get better at getting better.”
Marketers also shared deeply honest insights on the say-do gap within the industry. On one hand, there are conversations ad nauseum in the industry about communicating effectively, empathising with teams, and reflecting on how situations ought to be handled. On the other hand, there’s the reality of getting things done, working hard and fast, and ensuring productivity and efficiencies, without getting overly caught up in the emotions or the stressors of daily life.
Adding her thoughts to this discourse, Shardan said, “In the advertising industry, we are in the business of managing emotions more than managing people. We deal with a lot of passionate individuals, who tend to be a little more sensitive. It’s critical to learn how to navigate through these emotions while staying focused and centred on our vision. How we lead the team is just as crucial as the outcomes that the teams generate.”
She added, “The younger generation have a huge part to play in this. They demand transparency and genuine engagement rather than automated responses and emotionless ways of working. When it comes to recruitment and talent retention, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the younger generation prioritizes work culture over salary.
There’s no doubt about it: higher emotional quotient (EQ) within leadership keeps employees motivated, engaged and, most importantly, loyal – which is very important in our line of business.”
Marketers also discussed extending emotional intelligence beyond leadership to everyone in the organisation as a core capability rather than a ‘nice-to-have’ soft skill.
French-Ritsch said, “Right from the recruitment stage, it’s important to go beyond technical ability to also employ people based on EQ. Within the travel and tourism space, we’re not just selling destinations, we’re also crafting experiences and evoking a deep emotional connection with people. To deliver this, we need to fine-tune our ability to sense the collective sentiment – whether that’s from within our teams or from customers, investors, policymakers and other stakeholders who are part of the larger ecosystem.”
She added, “The younger generation has taken this a step further by calling for emotionally intelligent ecosystems where every employee, at every level, feels seen and heard. This generation also holds its leadership accountable to how it leads in a way that’s more profound, more actionable. They demand a more human form of leadership, which I think is positive.”
The industry leaders concluded that those who are not prioritising emotional intelligence run the risk of wasting potential within their teams, losing talent and failing to run sustainable brands and businesses that last the test of time.
George Yaryura summed it up saying, “Marketing is a mix of art and science and requires rounded individuals. It not only requires the science of understanding data analytics and crafting insights and strategies from it, but also the art of emotional storytelling and sensing intuitively the anxiousness or the raw emotions of consumers.”
3. Marketing craft: Brand vs. performance
In the final phase of the CMO round table discussion, marketers discussed the need to balance the long-term growth of an organisation with an eye on brand, while hitting short-term targets with an eye on performance metrics.
They shared the harsh truth that, quite often, it boils down to the sales performance of a company and, if that’s good, then they get to focus on brand. Quite often, it can seem like it’s only the marketing team that’s focused on brand-building, while the rest of the company couldn’t care much about it.
To address this, Gopishetty said, “We need to continue doing two things. Firstly, we need to work closer with the entire organisation, including HR, internal communications, sales, and especially finance, to emphasize the potential fallout of throwing “brand-marketing” out of the window. Secondly, we need to find a way to set aside a small percent of marketing budget, at all times, to focus exclusively on brand marketing to remain relevant and top of mind – even if that means confidently pushing back on directives to spend a 100 per cent of the budget on performance.”
French-Ritsch added, “The decision to focus on brand while simultaneously focusing on performance is not just a tactical decision, it’s also a philosophical stance on value creation. The challenge isn’t necessarily whether to prioritise brand or performance; it’s about recognising that, in today’s landscape, brand is performance. If we only focus on short-term ROI, we will erode the emotional capital that makes a brand sustainable. Conversely, if we invest only in long-term brand-building without immediate business impact, we lose agility. So, it’s a fine balance; it’s a dance between the two.”
Discussing “one of the most outdated dichotomies of marketing”, marketers reiterated that there’s a need to balance the art and science of marketing and engineer ways for the two to amplify each other.
Referring to marketing as a “marathon run in sprints”, Sherdan said, “The brand-building exercise is the marathon, but we need the sprints of short-term performance metrics to keep us in the running within the marathon. It’s never an either-or situation; it’s both in constant combination.”
Summing up the conversation, Yaryura said, “Ultimately, it’s about always keeping that long-term vision and that big-picture strategy in mind. Whether it’s a conversation with the board, senior stakeholders or with the consumers, it boils down to how we’re contributing to the long-term vision through incremental wins. It’s about delivering this at pace, with agility and immediacy, while still constantly creating lifetime value. Whether it’s leaning into AI strategies, strengthening leadership, leveraging emotional intelligence that help us in our day-to-day jobs, we do all of this while constantly reminding ourselves of the long-term effect of each of our decisions on the organisation and the brand.”
