Olga Zyryaeva, Global Marketing and Communications VP at Sony Music.Clicks have lost their magic. What once felt like surgical precision now resembles background noise. In today’s crowded digital space, performance marketing is less about impact and more about burn. The real breakthrough happens when brands meet consumers not on the endless scroll, but at the point of intent. That’s what retail media does: it turns checkout into a stage for relevance.
The Middle East is wired differently. Malls remain cultural anchors, e-commerce adoption is accelerating, loyalty ecosystems are consolidating, and regulators are leaning into data sovereignty. The combination is unique – and it creates conditions for retail media to scale faster here than almost anywhere else.
No social feed, no search query, no influencer knows a consumer better than the place where they actually buy. Retailers hold the keys: first-party data, purchase intent, loyalty signals. For brands, this is not just targeting – it’s intimacy, delivered without the spiraling CPMs of traditional digital channels.
Retail media replaces vanity with value. Forget impressions. The real metrics are dwell time, add-to-cart rates, repeat purchases. The logic is closer to curating a playlist than to blasting a campaign: sequencing messages in a way that feels effortless, but is in fact meticulously designed to land at the right moment.
The numbers say it all. A leading GCC beauty brand saw sales lift by 25 per cent after diverting budgets into retail partnerships. A Saudi electronics retailer boosted repeat purchase by 40 per cent with sponsored product placements. These are not marginal gains – they are category-shaping results.
The logic is closer to curating a playlist than to blasting a campaign: sequencing messages in a way that feels effortless, but is in fact meticulously designed to land at the right moment.
What makes retail media in MENA so powerful is that it’s never just transactional. It borrows from the codes of culture: storytelling, context, community. The same way a single track can redefine how you feel about a brand, a well-placed message inside a retail ecosystem can transform consumer intent. And just as labels engineer collaborations with care, brands that curate retail touchpoints with cultural fluency will unlock disproportionate impact.
Consumers here don’t just buy products – they buy moments. And attention is the rarest currency. We know a three-minute track can hold focus in a distracted world; retail media has to master the same trick. Formats that command attention long enough to shift behaviour will set the new standard. Sonic branding turns into memory. Retail media, done right, turns browsing into loyalty.
The playbook is taking shape:
- Define your role inside the retail ecosystem.
- Anchor campaigns in culture, not just transactions.
- Experiment with formats that blur commerce and entertainment.
- Measure what matters – dwell time, loyalty, repeat purchase.
- Treat attention as your scarcest, most valuable resource.
Retail media is not an add-on. It’s the new centre stage. In a region where shopping is inseparable from culture and community, the brands that learn how to orchestrate this channel will be the ones writing the billion-dollar headlines.
By Olga Zyryaeva, Global Marketing and Communications VP at Sony Music.
