I've spent much of my career marketing across the Middle East and North Africa, and I've watched a lot of global brands and international marketers arrive in the region with a playbook that worked beautifully everywhere else and then quietly underperform here. Not because the marketers were bad, they were often excellent, but because they treated MENA as a single translation exercise: take what works in the home market, swap the language, adjust the media plan, and go. MENA punishes that assumption. It's one of the most diverse, fast-moving, and misunderstood marketing environments in the world, and the things that make it distinctive are exactly the things a global playbook tends to flatten. Here's what those playbooks most often get wrong. Treating MENA as one market The first and most fundamental error is in the acronym itself. "MENA" groups together countries that differ enormously in wealth, media habits, dialect, religiosity, regulatory environment, c...
Every marketing team I speak to now uses AI in some form. Someone is drafting captions in ChatGPT, someone else is generating images, a third person is quietly pasting the quarterly numbers into a chatbot and asking it what to make of them. What almost none of these teams have is fluency. They have usage, which is a very different thing, and the gap between the two is where most of the value is either won or lost. I spent the past month deliberately closing that gap for myself and my team, working through Anthropic Academy's courses and then rolling the thinking out across how we actually work. What follows is what I've come to believe fluency means, why usage alone is a trap, and how a marketing leader can build the real thing. Usage is not fluency Here is the uncomfortable truth about how most marketers adopted AI: they treated it like a faster search engine or a junior copywriter who never sleeps. You ask, it answers, you paste the answer somewhere. That works for the ...