VML‘s Ross Grant, Head of Digital Strategy & Transformation, MENA and Oliver West, Head of Customer Experience (CX), MENA share how agencies are moving beyond performance theatre to focus on operating model reinvention, behavioural insight and frictionless customer experience – where innovation is measured by long-term value and trust.
What does meaningful innovation look like for agencies in 2026?
Grant: For clients, meaningful innovation in 2026 is systemic, measurable and human-centred. Innovation is no longer about loud and bold ideas or shiny products and tech. It’s about changing how value is created, delivered and measured at speed, at scale, and with deep relevance to your customers.
Aside from continuing to define new ways of delivering innovation for clients, agencies need to change how they operate: building AI into operating models, reducing layers to enable faster decisions, and blending onshore/offshore talent with permanent and freelance talent. Clients and competing agencies can easily copy tools, but innovative operating models are differentiators far harder to mimic.
What are the biggest lessons digital agencies are carrying from 2025 into 2026?
Grant: Gone are the days agencies talked digital – operationally, commercially and reputationally. In 2026 agencies must live digital. AI can no longer be theatre. Strategy must be measurable to be bought. Agencies must become more specialised and focused. The key is creating differentiation by generating trust, ensuring governance around AI, mitigating data residency risks, and baking in accessibility by design. Agencies must price for clear client value and provide flexibility to avoid procurement teams squeezing their margins. Lastly, heading into 2026, it’s clear that experience is getting physical again, with the region rewarding agencies that can connect the end-to-end experience.
What new forms of value are clients demanding beyond performance – and how are agencies adapting to meet those expectations?
West: In a world where a lot of optimisation can be automated, good performance is almost expected. The more interesting conversation now is: how do we keep the experience feeling genuinely human when so much of the process is invisible and automated? In crowded categories like banking, retail, telco and travel, it’s getting harder to win on product or price alone. What tends to stick is how it feels to deal with the brand when you’re opening an account, changing a booking, or fixing a problem. If that feels clear, fair and low‑effort, people usually stay put, even if they could save a bit elsewhere.
Behavioural science is useful here because it forces us to design for how people really behave, not how we’d like them to. Most of us avoid friction, follow social cues, overreact to potential loss, and default to the easiest option on the screen. Rather than trying to “re-educate” people, we experiment around those tendencies. A lot of the progress comes from small, testable tweaks – a change in the default setting, a different way of framing a choice, a clearer bit of copy at a stressful moment in the journey, and then running A/B tests to see what actually shifts behaviour, rather than going on gut feelings.
The definition is also shifting. It’s not just “Did the campaign sell more this week?”, but “Did we make it easier to be this brand’s customer, and can we see that over time?” So the metrics that matter start to include repeat use, churn, complaint volumes, how long it takes to get something done, and how likely people are to recommend the brand after an interaction. Some of the most effective work we see now is rarely a single big, flashy idea; it’s a series of pragmatic, well‑tested changes that remove friction, build a bit more trust at each step, and quietly turn transactions into relationships.
How are agencies restructuring teams and processes to stay agile in a fast-changing environment?
West: On the inside, the real shift is more about mindset than org charts. We still have specialist teams – CRM, data, tech, content and CX – but the better work happens when everyone is looking at the same journey rather than just “their channel”. So instead of starting with “we need an app” or “we need an email”, we try to start with “Where is the customer in their journey, what are they trying to do, and what’s getting in the way?” That simple reframing changes the brief and usually keeps us closer to real customer problems, not just internal KPIs.
Behind the scenes, a lot of our focus is on how automation and AI can quietly make those teams more effective without lowering the bar on quality. The tech and commerce teams are using it to speed up things like pulling and cleaning data, spotting patterns in journeys and feedback, generating content variations to test, and drafting first-pass reports – the operational stuff that used to soak up time. But the decisions about what to create, test, and ship, and what it means for the customer, are still firmly human. We’re very intentional about keeping human oversight, especially where decisions affect pricing, targeting or anything that touches trust. The aim is pretty simple: give people more time to think, collaborate and solve customer problems, and less time wrestling with process and production.
