Muneef Khan, CEO, 5th Element.In this Industry Snapshot, 5th Element’s Muneef Khan explains how the agency has moved from buying audiences to buying moments and why this is significant to media planning in the region as a whole.
What does meaningful media planning and investment look like in 2026, and how has that definition evolved over the past year?
Meaningful media planning in 2026 means moving beyond channel obsession to outcome architecture. We’re no longer asking ‘where should we be?’ but ‘what behaviour change are we engineering?’ At 5th Element, we’ve shifted from traditional media mix modeling to what we call behavioral cascade planning, mapping every touchpoint to specific decision triggers in the customer journey.
In an ecosystem shaped by automation, algorithms and platform dominance, what should the media industry protect at all costs?
Strategic judgment and creative bravery. Algorithms optimise for efficiency, but they’re inherently conservative, they reinforce what worked yesterday. The industry must protect its ability to make bold, counterintuitive calls that data would never recommend but culture demands.
At our agency, we have a rule: if AI suggests it, we challenge it. The second thing we must protect is transparency. Platform dominance has created black boxes where marketers pump money in and hope results come out. We owe our clients radical transparency showing them exactly what their money bought, not what the algorithm says it delivered.
How can the media industry balance innovation, experimentation and new channels with consistency, accountability and effectiveness?
The answer is structured experimentation with ring-fenced failure budgets. We allocate 15-20 per cent of client budgets specifically for testing new platforms, formats or audience segments with clear success metrics defined upfront. This isn’t ‘let’s try TikTok because everyone else is.’ It’s hypothesis-driven innovation.
The key is treating innovation like R&D, not marketing. You need dedicated resources, controlled environments and the discipline to kill experiments that don’t work quickly.
As attention becomes harder to earn and easier to waste, how should media strategies prioritise quality, context and relevance?
Stop buying audiences. Start buying moments. We’ve moved from demographic targeting to decision-state targeting, identifying the exact moment when someone is mentally available for your message. A person scrolling Instagram at 11pm is cognitively different from the same person at 7am. Context is the new creative. We’re seeing 3-4x performance differences between identical ads served in contextually relevant versus irrelevant environments.
Quality isn’t about premium inventory anymore, it’s about cognitive alignment. The future belongs to agencies that can map mental availability windows and engineer presence in them, not those chasing reach and frequency.
By Muneef Khan, CEO, 5th Element.
