Brands should plan Saudi Arabia as its own market, says SRMG Media Solutions CEO.
SRMG Media Solutions' Nedaa Al Mubarak tells Communicate that brands now plan Saudi Arabia as a priority market, and that media there must prove attention and business results.
By Brief & Butter · Oct 6, 2026
Brands now plan Saudi Arabia as a priority market in its own right rather than as a share of a regional media buy, argues Nedaa Al Mubarak, CEO of SRMG Media Solutions (SMS), in an interview with Communicate published on 6 October 2026. Her short version: a regional campaign with a Saudi allocation is "not a Saudi strategy".
SMS is the commercial arm of Saudi Research and Media Group (SRMG). According to Arab News, which SRMG owns, it is the exclusive commercial representative for more than 30 of the group's brands, including Asharq News, Arab News, Sayidaty and Thmanyah. Al Mubarak was appointed in July 2025 after running SRMG Think, the group's strategic consulting business. Her view comes from the sell side: SMS sells the premium content, audience data and branded content her argument favours.
Why the Kingdom gets its own plan
Al Mubarak puts the shift down to scale, purchasing power, high digital consumption and sustained investment in content, entertainment, sport and tourism. Saudi audiences also behave differently and have a strong cultural identity, so brands need their own audience insight, local creative judgement and work developed for the market from the outset.
Brands are already giving the Kingdom dedicated briefs and budgets, she says, while agencies build local strategy and creative teams and platforms develop products and partnerships around Saudi behaviour. The bar has risen too. Saudi content is getting better quickly, and audiences expect brands to handle language, imagery, humour and values "without relying on stereotypes". Occasional flagship campaigns are not enough: brands need strong local content, consistently, with Saudi talent and partners involved early and, where relevant, Arabic treated as an original creative language.
She also warns against assuming that regional scale requires regional generalisation. "MENA is not one audience", she says, and Saudi Arabia is not a single audience either.
Where the money is going
Demand is strongest, according to Al Mubarak, in tourism, entertainment and sport, financial services, technology and telecoms, retail and mobility. Video, creator-led content, live and sports environments, and branded content made for digital distribution are attracting more investment, and the market is moving towards packages that combine premium content, audience data, distribution and measurement.
Her advice to CMOs: "do not buy reach in isolation". Money should follow a defined audience, a credible content environment, a clear role for the brand and an agreed way of measuring results, not the lowest cost per impression. For premium publishers, brand safety is only the minimum. The value lies in a trusted environment, distinctive content, a clearly defined audience and evidence that the spend changed awareness, consideration or action.
First-party data is central to her case. Consented data from across SRMG's media, she says, shows the content interests, format preferences, frequency and engagement of different audience groups. SMS uses it to define higher-value segments, manage frequency, optimise against actual behaviour and, increasingly, shape branded content.
Creators and the measurement gap
Al Mubarak calls creators a media channel in their own right, but says they are usually worth most inside a wider premium media plan. Brands should define a creator's role before choosing the person, select on audience fit, credibility and objective rather than "follower count alone", and brief, distribute and measure creators like any other media investment.
Measurement is where she wants the most change. Reach, views, engagement and attention are "not interchangeable", she says, yet they are often presented as if they were. CMOs need comparable measures, deduplicated reach and frequency where possible, transparent data sources and independent validation. Publishers, platforms and creators need not report identical metrics, but all should be judged against the same business objective, with measurement agreed before a campaign starts.
What it means for marketers
This is a media seller's argument, and the interview gives no spending figures or growth rates to show the shifts she describes. Most of her advice holds whichever media owner a brand buys from, though.
- Write a Saudi brief with its own budget and audience insight instead of adapting a regional plan, and involve Saudi talent and partners from the start.
- Agree the measures with each publisher, platform and creator before launch: which numbers show delivery, which show attention and which show business results. Ask for deduplicated reach and independent validation where they exist.
- When a media owner offers first-party data, ask how consent was collected and how the data is governed, and test targeting on it against your own benchmarks.
- Choose creators by role and audience fit, and hold them to the same reporting as paid media.
Her warning about regional generalisation also applies inside the Kingdom: one plan for every Saudi audience repeats the same mistake on a smaller scale.
Sources
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