Muhammad Shayan Sheikh, Senior Media Planner, House of Communication. Every time uncertainty hits, the same meeting happens in boardrooms across the UAE and the GCC. Budgets are reviewed, and marketing is usually the first to feel the cut. It is an understandable instinct. It is also, consistently, the wrong one.
The cost of going quiet rarely shows on a spreadsheet. But it appears in market share, brand recall, and how long recovery takes. According to Kantar, brands that go dark face a 39 per cent reduction in brand awareness and significantly delay their own recovery.
Going dark is not saving money
During COVID 19, an IAB GCC survey found that 48 per cent of regional brands cut budgets by up to 30 per cent, and 20 per cent paused advertising entirely. The brands that stayed visible came out ahead. Those that paused did not just lose revenue. They lost brand memory, and rebuilding it cost more than staying present would have.
e&, which maintained presence throughout the pandemic, tying its brand to national purpose and digital connectivity, saw its brand value grow by 129 per cent between 2020 and 2022, rising to USD 11.84 billion and earning recognition as the world’s strongest telecom brand. Brands across travel and hospitality that cut deeply found their recovery longer and more expensive than it needed to be.
This market makes the cost of going dark even higher
The UAE’s GDP is forecast to grow 5.6 per cent in 2026. Total GCC digital advertising is set to hit $12.4 billion, growing at nearly double the global average. When you go dark in a market growing this fast, you are not standing still. You are moving backwards while everyone around you accelerates.
And this extends beyond digital. The UAE’s outdoor advertising market generated $345.8 million in 2024 and is projected to reach $498.7 million by 2030. With 85 per cent of people in the UAE remembering out of home ads seen during their commute, physical presence is one of the highest recall touchpoints available in this market.
It takes five to seven impressions for a brand to become familiar to a consumer. Brands with consistent messaging see a 29 per cent higher recall rate and 86 per cent of consumers say consistency makes a brand feel more trustworthy. A well chosen outdoor location generates a pattern of repeated exposure at a cost per thousand that remains among the lowest across all media.
Add the commercial rhythm of this region, Ramadan, Eid, UAE National Day, White Friday, and the cost of going dark becomes even more tangible. These are the peak commercial windows of the year. Missing them is not a budget saving. It is a competitive gift to your rivals.
The industry has seen this before. Leaders are saying it again.
Uncertainty is not a reason to go quiet. It is a reason to be smarter and stay present across the right channels.
The question is not whether uncertainty exists. It does. The question is what it costs your brand to go quiet while it does.
Across the region, markets that have navigated prolonged periods of uncertainty offer perhaps the clearest illustration of what sustained brand silence costs. In Lebanon, once one of the most vibrant advertising markets in the Arab world, ad spend declined dramatically through successive periods of economic and market disruption. What had been a thriving, creative industry, one that shaped regional advertising culture for decades, saw billboards go dark and brand voices go quiet.
The lesson from that experience is not about the scale of the disruption. It is about what comes after. Brands and categories that maintained even a modest presence, that kept communicating with consumers through the uncertainty, found themselves in a stronger position when conditions began to stabilise. Those that went fully silent found recovery slower and costlier, not because the market had forgotten them, but because rebuilding brand memory always costs more than sustaining it.
As confidence returns and market conditions improve, the brands best placed to benefit will be those that never fully stepped away. Presence, even at reduced levels, preserves the brand memory that recovery depends on. The moment a market begins to move again, the brands still standing in consumers’ minds move with it. Those that went dark have to earn that ground back.
By Muhammad Shayan Sheikh, Senior Media Planner, House of Communication.
