Adly data: 92% of Gulf ads are in Arabic, even for English-lettered brands.
Ads written by Gulf businesses with English-letter brand names are overwhelmingly in Arabic, according to data from the AI marketing platform Adly. The figure is 92%, and 43% of the Gulf businesses on the platform use English-letter names.
Communicate reported the findings on 3 November. Adly looked at ads created on its platform between February and October 2026 across the GCC, the Levant and North Africa, leaving out automated content, test accounts and internal accounts. In the UAE, 94% of ads were in Arabic. Adly founder Hani Hourani is quoted in the piece.
The data also points to differences in tone. About one in five Gulf businesses used luxury wording such as "luxurious" or "refined", against about one in seven in the Levant, and 17% of Gulf brands used a luxury voice compared with 5% in North Africa. Free delivery was used as a hook by fewer than one in 200 Gulf businesses. Among Gulf businesses that used numbers, about nine in ten preferred Western digits over Arabic-Indic ones.
Adly says its sample is its own platform users rather than a random sample of businesses, and that its word matching is approximate. That matters: these are small advertisers using one AI tool, not the whole market. The figures come from a single source and Brief & Butter has not seen the underlying data.
Our read: for agencies and brands, the finding supports starting in Arabic even where the brand name is Latin, and suggests luxury positioning is more crowded in the Gulf than free-delivery offers. Treat it as a directional signal from one vendor, not a market benchmark.
Why it matters
Gulf advertisers write mostly in Arabic whatever their brand name looks like; the data is from one vendor's platform, so treat it as directional.
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