Saleh Ghazal, CEO of OMD MENA.At the OMD Sense conference this year, experts painted a complex future shaped by technological advancements, offering strategies to navigate challenges and transform them into opportunities.
The event, which took place at the Museum of the Future, drew a large crowd of senior business and marketing professionals from brands, agencies, and media circles.
Conference speakers urged marketers to stay optimistic and seize opportunities amid the complexity and disruption the industry will face in the coming years.
“During the next 20 years, we will have to face an extraordinary and unprecedented confluence of economic, political, social, climate and technological transformations. Our job will be to regulate our own emotions and anxieties before helping others, people we know and care about, as well as people we don’t,” said speaker Noah Raford, EMIR’s Head of Advisory and former futurist-in-chief for Dubai.
His session focused on what lies ahead for the three key consumer groups in the next few decades. According to him, some people will escape into distractions like gaming, avoiding reality. Others, especially Gen Alpha, will approach technologies like AI as tools to build new, creative things instead of being overwhelmed by them.
Remedying the marketing disconnect
OMD EMEA’s CEO Blake Cuthbert’s described six forces that disconnected marketing and advertising from growth and offered six counter-approaches to turn them into positives.
These include abundance planning, cultural activations, integrated creator planning, commerce intelligence, agentic buying, and the agent ecosystem.
“It’s not a case of humans or machines but humans and machines, even in terms of to whom or what we will address marketing messages to,” Cuthbert said. “Individuals and organisations will have to maintain their prompt libraries, which will usher in a new paradigm of effectiveness. What we’re seeing is the end of Big Advertising and a future with lots of littles, characterised by hyper-personalised messages in branded ecosystems.”
Using AI thoughtfully is key to cultivate industry expertise
Digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush took to the stage to reveal extensive research in digital culture across the MENA region.
She shed light on the unseen forces at play in our interactions with technology, uncovering the subtle yet profound ways it shapes our thoughts, decisions, and habits. Harfoush offered actionable strategies to extract the benefits of technological advancements while safeguarding ourselves against unintended consequences. “After automating manufacturing, we’re now automating knowledge work,” she explained. “If we rely too heavily on AI without remaining thoughtful and engaged, we risk losing mastery of our thinking and expertise when we need it to validate the work of machines,” she said.
Harfoush urged the audience to cultivate “intentional expertise” to ensure that human creativity, judgment, and depth of knowledge remain irreplaceable pillars of progress.
Audiences at the OMD Sense conference also heard from Qi Pan, Snap’s Director of Computer Vision Engineering. He revealed ‘story-living’ to be the next iteration of the media experience.
According to him, the future includes leveraging augmented reality to bring media experiences that will involve people in large, shared environments.
“The technology and devices are developing to make this vision a reality. The ability to add digital content on top of the physical world is hugely exciting for users and brands, as they now can add entertainment and information at scale,” Pan said. “With rapid tech advancements, AR is becoming more natural, letting users add content to the real world without losing touch with it.”
Finally OMD MENA’s CEO, Saleh Ghazal wrapped up the conference urging the industry to be adoptable to change when it comes to their marketing. “Decoding Generation (H)uman has been designed as a rallying cry to operate the deep transformation the next decades call for,” he said.
While he acknowledges that the foundations of business and marketing are being shaken by big changes –economic, technological, cultural, he claims that “looking at our world through an empathetic lens” is what will set advertising and marketing agencies apart.
“Yes, it can be uncomfortable and even scary but being innovative in this context means being courageous and inquisitive, finding the upside by flipping challenges on their head. It also means understanding what makes people unique and connecting with them relevantly and authentically at scale,” he concluded.
