Rami Salamé, Account Director, Hashtag MediaSocial media in the GCC has become something most brands weren’t prepared for. Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp and Snapchat are now, for many companies, the primary interface between business and customer, where discovery happens, purchases are decided and brand reputation is either built or quietly eroded. Most agency partnerships haven’t kept up with that reality.
We recently surveyed 300 senior marketing leaders across the UAE and KSA. What came back was honest rather than surprising.
Fifty-eight per cent say their agency underperforms. Fifty-four percent feel their agency doesn’t actually understand their brand. And yet budgets keep getting renewed, briefs keep going out, and the results stay flat.
Most brands in that position start shopping around and let price become the deciding filter, which is usually how a bad situation gets worse.
What cheap actually costs
Lower-cost agencies solve for volume. Content gets delivered on time, the posting schedule gets maintained, the account stays active. What they can’t offer is judgement, cultural fluency or the earned familiarity that makes work feel like it belongs to a brand.
Without those things, you get the symptoms that sixty-six percent of brands we surveyed identified as their biggest operational pain point. AI-generated content that feels assembled rather than made.
Localisation that translates words without translating meaning. Campaigns that treat the UAE and KSA as a single homogeneous market. One CMO told us directly that when a creative idea doesn’t fit the culture, the backlash costs more than any potential benefit.
These aren’t isolated creative failures, they’re what happens when an agency optimises for margin rather than outcomes, and in this region, cultural fluency is the baseline requirement for work that actually does something.
Why going in-house hasn’t solved it either
Recognising that the agency isn’t working, many brands have pulled things back in-house, hoping that direct control would produce better results.
About 70 per cent of the brands we interviewed now manage social mostly internally. The problem is that always-on publishing crowds out the thinking that makes publishing worthwhile.
Teams end up producing feed content, Stories, Reels, and short-form video across two languages while managing influencer relationships and performance reporting, with little capacity left for the work that actually shifts perception or builds a brand over time.
Sixty-two percent of in-house teams now say their content feels repetitive, and while the control was preserved, the results didn’t follow.
What the right partnerships actually look like
Neither path has delivered what brands actually need, which is expertise they can trust, applied with genuine knowledge of the market.
The brands getting traction have moved past the in-house versus agency framing and found a single partner they can let into the room, not a vendor receiving briefs at arm’s length, but a team with full context and shared accountability for outcomes.
Around 71 per cent of respondents said specialised creative and strategic skills are what they value most from external partnerships. They want capabilities they can’t sustain internally, and they want those capabilities embedded deeply enough to feel like they come from inside the brand.
That requires more than a retainer. It requires a partner who understands the brand’s logic, not just its executional requirements, and who is willing to push back when an idea isn’t right for the market.
Those kind of partnerships is built on time and transparency, and a stripped-back engagement rarely creates the conditions for either.
Nearly 52 per cent of GCC brands plan to increase social spending over the next 12 months, which means more content, more campaigns, and more exposure when something misses.
The brands that come out ahead won’t be the ones with the biggest budgets. They’ll be the ones that built partnerships where the agency genuinely understands the market, shares accountability for results, and is honest enough to say when an idea isn’t ready.
Given what’s at stake, that’s the only standard worth holding anyone to.
By Rami Salamé, Account Director, Hashtag Media
