Hasan N. Abughosh, VP Marketing & Brand, webook.com.Entertainment and sports marketing today has a strange addiction. The assumption across the industry is that if attention is hard to win, the solution must be simple: produce more content. More videos, more creators, more behind-the-scenes clips, more short-form storytelling, more ads targeting “fans.” It sounds logical until you look at what actually happens in people’s feeds. Everyone is doing exactly the same thing.
When I started digging into the numbers while researching the entertainment and sports marketing landscape in Saudi Arabia and the GCC, the first insight that jumped out was almost ironic. The region doesn’t have an access problem anymore. Internet penetration across GCC markets sits around the high-90 per cent range. In Saudi Arabia specifically, nearly 98 per cent of people access the internet through mobile devices, about 79 per cent watch online video content regularly, and more than 96 per cent are active on social media networks.
In other words, marketers have already solved reach. What they have not solved is relevance. That distinction is at the heart of why entertainment and sports marketing increasingly feels like shouting inside a crowded stadium.
The feed as the new sports and entertainment arena
The biggest structural shift in entertainment and sports marketing isn’t the rise of creators or even the explosion of events across the GCC. It’s the fact that the primary arena where audiences discover experiences is no longer a venue or a billboard. It is the infinite social feed. And that feed behaves like an algorithmic marketplace.
Every video competes with thousands of others. A football highlight appears between a comedy sketch and someone teaching you how to cook pasta in six different ways. Attention lasts seconds, not minutes. The moment a viewer loses interest, the scroll continues.
And let’s face it, the problem is that algorithms reward patterns. When everyone optimises for the same formats and signals, everything begins to look identical. Brands end up competing with each other using the same creators, the same hooks, the same targeting logic, and often the same audiences. The result is what I like to call algorithmic sameness.
Different logos, same marketing. And this doesn’t apply only to this industry, this applies to marketing at large.
Interest-based targeting has reached its limits
For years the digital advertising model relied heavily on interest segmentation. Platforms promised marketers the ability to target “sports fans,” “music lovers,” or “gaming audiences.” The theory sounded powerful. In practice, those audiences are simply too broad.
When you target sports fans in Saudi Arabia today, you are essentially targeting a large portion of the country. Football alone commands enormous attention. Interest categories do not predict behavior anymore. They only describe identity. And identity does not necessarily translate into action. Someone may love football but still never buy a ticket. Someone may follow a musician but never attend a concert. Interest is descriptive. Intent is predictive.
The real opportunity lies in intent
What changes the game is the shift from targeting audiences based on who they are to understanding what they are about to do.
Intent signals are everywhere in the entertainment and sports ecosystems, particularly in digital ticketing environments. When a user checks event dates, explores seating maps, compares prices, or revisits an event page multiple times, those actions tell a far richer story than demographic targeting ever could.
Ticketing behaviour alone creates a trail of signals: seat selection patterns, purchase timing, group size preferences, or even how long someone hesitates before completing payment.
Most organisations still treat ticketing systems as operational tools rather than intelligence engines. Yet these behavioural signals are far more predictive of future purchases than traditional marketing segments.
In a region where online purchasing is increasingly normalised, with roughly 71 per cent of individuals in Saudi Arabia already buying goods and services online, the gap between interest and action becomes easier to observe. The data is already there. What is missing is the will to interpret it.
AI’s real role is prediction, not content
There is a lot of excitement around AI-generated content in marketing. Every week a new tool promises to write captions, create ads, or generate visuals faster than a human team. That is, and allow me to be a little cynical, amazingly and interestingly groundbreaking, but it is not where the real transformation lies. I mean, in a fast paced AI revolution that is quickly pacing towards accelerating its pacing, generative AI is so 2023 now.
AI’s true advantage is its ability to process behavioural signals and estimate probabilities. Instead of simply identifying “fans,” predictive systems can estimate the likelihood that a specific person will purchase a ticket within a certain timeframe, attend an event if offered a particular bundle, or return for another experience later in the season. Once those probabilities exist, marketing becomes fundamentally different.
Campaigns become adaptive systems. Messaging changes depending on where someone sits within an intent spectrum: casual discovery, active exploration, purchase readiness, or post-event engagement. The creative itself can be assembled dynamically. Language, visuals, timing, and channels adjust according to context. In other words, the marketing experience begins to resemble a conversation rather than a broadcast.
Saudi Arabia is uniquely positioned for this shift
The transformation of entertainment in Saudi Arabia over the past decade has produced exactly the conditions where intent-driven marketing becomes powerful.
The country now hosts a dense calendar of events, sports competitions, and cultural experiences. Cinema alone sold roughly 17.5 million tickets in a recent year, generating hundreds of millions of riyals in revenue. If so, if concerts and sports matches were happening every day, 360 days a year, can you imagine the volume of those?
Those transactions represent more than entertainment activity. They represent behavioral signals. Every purchase, every attendance scan, every event check-in contributes to a deeper understanding of audience behavior. At scale, those signals become the foundation for predictive systems capable of understanding not just what audiences like, but when they are most likely to act.
Regulation will accelerate the shift
Another factor shaping the future of marketing in the GCC is the region’s evolving regulatory landscape. Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law and similar frameworks across the region introduce stricter rules around consent, data handling, and marketing communications. While some marketers initially view these regulations as obstacles, they may actually accelerate the transition toward first-party data strategies.
Organisations that build compliant, consent-driven data ecosystems will have a competitive advantage. Those relying heavily on third-party audiences and platform targeting will find it increasingly difficult to maintain precision.
In simple terms, the brands that own their behavioural signals will be the brands that understand their audiences best.
A different kind of marketing future
The future of entertainment and sports marketing, or marketing in general in Saudi Arabia and the GCC will belong to organisations that treat marketing less like a production studio and more like an intelligence system.
Instead of asking what content to create next, the question becomes far more interesting: what is the next best action for each audience member right now? Sometimes the answer will be a video, sometimes a personalised ticket offer, sometimes a reminder about an upcoming match, and occasionally the smartest action will be to do nothing at all. Which, if we are honest, is probably the hardest marketing strategy for most teams to accept.
However, in an environment where audiences are overwhelmed by content, restraint becomes its own form of relevance. The entertainment and sports industry in the GCC has already proven it can build world-class events, leagues, and experiences. The next step is building the intelligence systems that connect those experiences to the right audience at the right moment.
Because in a world saturated with content, the brands that succeed will not be the ones that speak the loudest. They will be the ones that know exactly when to speak. Now I turn my speaker, on highest volume, towards Musk, Zuckerberg, Yiming or Spiegel. If one of your platforms succeeds in building AI-Accurate prediction to deliver the message in the right time to a targeted audience member – with hyperpersonalisation mind you – yours might just become marketers’ favourite platform again, because right now they’re not “serving” enough.
By Hasan N. Abughosh, VP Marketing & Brand, webook.com.
