Eddy Rizk, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BIG KAHUNA FILMSIf you look at the history of content and advertising, it has always been a back and forth with the audience. Brands put ideas out, audiences react, and the next move adjusts accordingly.
The dynamics hasn’t changed. What has changed is the speed, the intensity, and the number of players involved. In 2026, brands aren’t competing for attention in a one-on-one exchange. They’re competing in real time, across platforms, with everyone else at once.
That’s why the brands that perform best won’t be the ones producing the most content, but the ones making better decisions about what they produce.
Tickets to Campaign Middle East’s Ramadan Breakfast Briefing & The Year Ahead event are selling out fast. Click here to claim your seat for Friday, 13 February to network with and listen to top clients and agency leaders.
With artificial intelligence (AI) and accessible production tools, creating content is easier than ever. The challenge, always, is creativity. Not every idea deserves to exist, and not every message deserves attention.
‘‘As production speeds increase, quality becomes more noticeable. Audiences have become more experienced and selective.’’
This also means ideas can no longer be developed without considering how they will live and evolve. Platforms, formats and production complexity shape the idea from the start.
Take vertical video as an example. It sits at the centre of this shift. It’s not an adaptation of traditional content. It’s its own medium. People don’t sit down to watch vertical content.
It’s with them all the time. And they don’t experience it the way they experience film or television. They scroll, they pause, and they decide within seconds whether something is worth their time.
That’s why traditional storytelling rules break in vertical, and why stories need to be told differently. Openings must be immediate. Framing needs to be tighter and more personal, often built around faces rather than scenes. Pacing has to move faster, with meaning delivered early. If the first second doesn’t work, the rest doesn’t matter.
Brands that understand this treat vertical as a language of its own and focus on building content that can evolve, adapt and scale across platforms.
AI will be fully embedded in workflows. Its real value lies in efficiency, not creativity. It should speed up processes like development, versioning, localisation, and optimisation, not replace creative judgment. When everyone has access to the same tools, ideation and creativity become more challenging.
And as production speeds increase, quality becomes more noticeable. Audiences have become more experienced and selective. And they are increasingly intolerant of forced brand presence, especially in environments they didn’t choose to engage with. Content performs better when people choose to engage with it, not when it’s imposed on them. Algorithms are now optimised for this behaviour.
Looking ahead, the future of content production isn’t about doing more or moving faster. It’s about working smarter. Understanding the medium, using technology appropriately, and focusing on ideation, consistency and relevance.
By Eddy Rizk, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, BIG KAHUNA FILMS
