Teddy Abdel Nour, Head Of Integrated Marketing, TEAM LEWISIf you walked out of the 1 Billion Followers Summit earlier this year, you’d think the future of influencer marketing had already been decided. Creators are the new media. Influence is the new currency. Scale is everything.
On stage, it all makes sense – In reality, it’s a lot messier.
Despite the explosion of the creator economy across the UAE and Saudi, there’s a growing disconnect between what looks successful and what actually drives impact.
Brands are producing more content than ever, partnering with more influencers than ever, hitting higher reach numbers than ever — and yet, very few are building anything that lasts.
Did we mistake activity for effectiveness?
The issue isn’t just execution. It’s structural. Influencer marketing has been engineered around what is easiest to measure – reach, impressions, engagement – not what actually builds brands.
Agencies often optimise for volume, brands optimise for visibility and creators are pushed to produce, not to differentiate.
The system doesn’t reward distinctiveness. It rewards output.
More creators, less impact
Saudi is one of the fastest-growing creator markets globally. The rise of local influencers, especially post-2030 acceleration, has given brands unprecedented access to culturally relevant voices.
But with that growth has come saturation. Every category – from automotive to banking to retail – is now running the same playbook:
- Big-name influencer
- Lifestyle integration
- Product mention
- Clean visuals
- Arabic caption
Post. Boost. Report.Repeat. The result? Volume. Scroll through your feed, strip away the logos, most of it is indistinguishable – That’s not influence. That’s noise.
The real problem: influencer-first thinking
The industry didn’t get here by accident – We got here because influencers became the shortcut.
Instead of asking, What’s the idea? we started asking, Who should we work with? And that shift fundamentaly broke the model.
Creators became the centre of the campaign, rather than a vehicle for it, the strategy started bending around them, the big idea became optional.
Which is why so much content today feels…identical. And in chasing short-term visibility, brands are eroding long-term positioning — showing up everywhere, but standing for nothing.
Engagement is not the metric you think it is
One of the biggest myths we continue to believe is that engagement equals effectiveness – Well It doesn’t, engagement is a signal and not an outcome.
You can have thousands of likes and still have zero brand recall, for example strong video views and no shift in perception, high interaction and no business impact.
In one recent campaign, a brand partnered with multiple high-reach creators, delivered strong engagement rates across platforms, and hit all its planned KPIs. On paper, it was a success. But when it came to brand recall and differentiation, there was no measurable shift. The content blended into the category, and the brand remained interchangeable.
Content is built for the algorithm, not for the brand. If we’re serious about effectiveness, we need to stop optimising for interaction and start measuring what actually matters: memory, meaning, and mental availability.
The localisation myth in influencer marketing
Another uncomfortable truth: a lot of what we call “local” isn’t actually local, most of it is adapted. Adding an Arabic line, casting a regional creator, or referencing a cultural moment doesn’t automatically make a campaign resonate.
Especially in Saudi, where audiences are incredibly tuned into nuance, context, and authenticity. They can tell the difference between something made for them and something made around them and increasingly, they’re rewarding the former and ignoring the latter.
Creators are not the strategy
This is where the industry needs to reset, I agree creators are powerful, but they are not the strategy. They are one part of a much larger system that includes:
- A clear strategic idea
- A defined role within the funnel
- Integration with media, PR, and performance
- Cultural relevance beyond surface level
When those elements are missing, influencer investment doesn’t solve the problem – it amplifies it. There’s also a contradiction in how we treat creators.
We call them partners, but manage them like media inventory – expected to deliver outputs against performance benchmarks. The more transactional the relationship becomes, the less authentic the content feels
From scale to substance
The next phase of the creator economy in the Middle East won’t be about more creators, more posts and more reach ( that game is already over). A return to fundamentals – big ideas, cultural resonance and distinctiveness.
Fewer partnerships, but more intentional ones, fewer posts, but stronger thinking, less reliance on faces, more focus on meaning.Because creators don’t build brands. They scale what already exists.
The brands starting to get this right are moving beyond influencers as distribution altogether. They are building communities, not just working with creators, but bringing them into the brand – into events, into product stories, into real-world experiences. Not as paid placements, but as participants.
These are not one-off collaborations. They are long-term relationships. People who genuinely use the product, show up consistently, create content because they want to – not because they’re briefed to.
In that model, creators are no longer just amplifiers. They become part of the ecosystem – community, advocacy, word of mouth, and culture.That’s where real influence starts to build. Not through reach, but through relevance and connection.
A necessary correction much needed
What we’re seeing now isn’t the failure of influencer marketing, it’s the consequence of overusing it without evolving it. Afctually the region doesn’t have an influence problem, it has a strategy problem and until we fix that, we’ll keep producing campaigns that look successful, feel busy, and ultimately… do very little.
Because in the end, influence without a strong idea isn’t influence at all – It’s just distribution.
By Teddy Abdel Nour, Head Of Integrated Marketing, TEAM LEWIS
