Dubai-based Choueiri Group’s Media Dome division has partnered with international adtech player MiQ. Michel Malkoun, Choueiri Group’s chief growth officer, and Richard Dunmall, global president of MiQ, discuss why this is the right time and place to move forward.
How will Media Dome’s strategic partnership with MiQ benefit brands and advertising agencies in the MENA region? Please tell us how this partnership will deliver a powerful digital proposition.
Michel Malkoun: With everything moving towards automation and most screens becoming digital, consumer behaviour is compelling media to tag along. There is a clear need in the MENA market to elevate the way we trade and transition from two screens (desktop and mobile) to a multi-screen or omnichannel approach. This is the market-gap MiQ can fill.
This partnership stands to elevate our game in many ways, with MiQ adding value to four key solutions. First, we have the advanced TV approach (YouTube, premium CTV/OTT and premium publishers’ video). Here’s one example of how we aim to elevate operating standards: With MiQ’s direct API integration with YouTube, we can gain insights into performance metrics at the individual video level. By placing MIQ’s advanced pixel on clients’ websites, we can create more customised targeting strategies for YouTube and discover, for example, which trends outside of video content might influence the number of likes, shares, video duration, views and subscriber counts, etc.
Then, there is MiQ Performance that helps gain data-led performance forecasts, high potential optimisations and KPI outcomes, as well as predict audience targeting, predict context, audio programmatic, DMP/CRM activation and contextual sequencing. In addition, MiQ Time & Place helps gain consumer journey and real-time conquesting strategies. By connecting various API partnerships, MiQ can ensure media delivery to the right person at the right time, based on real-world offline moments. And the last key vertical is MiQ High Impact Branding, with access to this creative suite showcasing award-winning solutions (high-impact creative, mobile, chatbots, DOOH and video).
What were the major factors, business needs or mutual goals driving Media Dome to partner with MiQ? What are the joint intentions moving forward and what can the market look forward to?
Michel Malkoun: For more than 10 years, MiQ has partnered with agencies and marketers to deliver business-changing results through better-connected marketing. This, combined with our 50-plus years of expertise in the local market and our focus on the sacred client, agency and publisher relationship, enabled us to make a quick call on partnering together.
Today, MiQ extends more than a billion daily programmatic opportunities (display, native, video across categories) covering a diverse inventory which is brought together by activating global DSP partnerships, PMP deals with local publishers and supply partners to instantly connect with the multi-language UAE audience and large ex-pat demographic. It’s a mobile-first approach, using curated data partners and products built only for the MENA market. It is also the first partnership of its kind with the largest telecom companies in MENA, licensing their direct mobile contract data. This will allow agencies to leverage MiQ’s precision targeting capabilities across markets worldwide, along with its product roadmap, including diversification across new programmatic channels such as DOOH and CTV.
What does MiQ bring to the Middle East?
Richard Dunmall: MiQ is the leading independent programmatic specialist globally, delivering solutions to more than 1,000 advertisers per month from our 18 offices in 10 markets. We use data signals to better understand user behaviour and trends, which ultimately ensures more successful media activation and outcomes for our partners.
Our approach is to be fully partner-agnostic, meaning we are able to take a broader view of what drives these behaviours, how consumers interact with devices/screens, and what real-world signals create shifts in those behavioural patterns.
We aim to demystify the jargon and focus instead on understanding the unique challenges our partners face, helping not only to solve media challenges but importantly also to solve broader business challenges.
Why the Middle East and why now?
Richard Dunmall: MENA has, for a long time, been a market that wants to challenge the status quo in terms of user behaviour, and in recent years the digital landscape has evolved dramatically. More recently, the media landscape has evolved at pace with the shift away from more traditional media sources, and with that comes the opportunity for programmatic to drive rapid digital growth, not just via desktop and mobile but also via new programmatic channels such as connected TV/advanced TV and DOOH.
As such, now is the right time to set up our MENA office locally, and in our Choueiri Group partnership, we have found the perfect blend of local market understanding and future media capabilities. MiQ is ideally placed to bring our wealth of experience in this space to support advertisers to connect all these new data signals more efficiently and drive new ways of connecting their overall media objectives.
We are doing this by building out a locally based team of specialists that have the wealth of experience and operational support from our multiple global hubs.
At the heart of everything we do is our data specialism, where more than 200 data scientists, engineers and analysts work tirelessly with the local markets to solve problems our partners face, while continuously challenging ourselves to build new technology to keep us ahead of the market.
We believe MENA will be one of the fastest-growing programmatic markets globally. Our experts will support the many brands that plan to adapt how they approach media activation over the coming months and years to retain and advance their competitive edge.
