Mazen Mroueh, Head of Retail Media & Partnerships at Publicis Media Middle East, examines why MENA’s rapidly growing retail media ecosystem needs stronger industry infrastructure, shared standards, better measurement and deeper collaboration to scale sustainably.
MENA’s retail market is on track to cross $1 trillion for the first time in 2026, according to Mordor Intelligence.
Retail media is riding that same curve: retailers like Carrefour are building first-party data assets, telcos like Omantel and quick-commerce players are entering the space, and global brands are no longer asking whether to invest here, but how fast and through whom.
I’ve spent the past year immersed in that build-out, and what’s become clear to me is that this momentum is exactly what makes a task force necessary, not as an industry nicety, but as infrastructure.
What A Task Force Actually Does
The value of an industry task force isn’t the logo on a slide. It’s what happens in the room. Retail media in this region is being built simultaneously by a dozen different retailers, telcos and platforms, each solving the same problems in isolation, without much visibility into how anyone else is doing it. A task force turns that isolation into shared knowledge. The honest conversations that make that possible rarely happen on stage at a conference; they happen in closed-door sessions, where a retailer can admit a measurement approach isn’t working and a brand can say plainly what’s stopping them from scaling investment. That kind of honesty doesn’t survive in public.
“The output isn’t a press release; it’s trust, and trust compounds into transparency across the wider ecosystem.”
The region has several bodies playing this role, each contributing differently. IAB MENA and IAB Europe push standards and measurement frameworks that let a campaign reported by one retailer mean the same thing when reported by another. Groups like the ABG MENA Retail Media Task Force, which I helped co-found, and the MMA convene brands, retailers, and agencies as equals rather than in the usual buyer-seller dynamic. RETHINK Retail and RetailWire pull the region’s work into the wider international conversation and bring outside scrutiny back in. None of these replaces the others; the ecosystem needs all of them working in parallel.
From One Campaign to a Repeatable Model
Last year, my team at Publicis Media ran a campaign for Haleon’s Sensodyne across 23 Carrefour hypermarkets in the UAE that shows what this kind of alignment can produce. We paired real-time in-store audience data with dynamic digital screens, so the creative playing inside stores responded to who was actually there, not a fixed loop built weeks in advance, and we tested it properly, a four-group A/B design over a month against a genuine control, with the results decisively in favour of the audience-triggered approach. That didn’t happen because any one partner did their job well in isolation. It happened because the retailer, the brand and the technology partners agreed in advance on what success looked like and were willing to test against a real control rather than just run the campaign and claim the win.
“That is exactly what a task force should help generalize: not a one-off case study, but a repeatable way of working other partnerships can follow without rebuilding trust from scratch each time.”
What The Industry Needs To Do Next
Getting more partnerships to that standard is a process problem, but scaling it across the region means moving on three fronts at once.
The first, and the one I’d push hardest, is brand participation.
Too many brands still treat these rooms as something agencies and retailers attend on their behalf, which risks building consensus the people actually funding retail media never asked for. This matters most for FMCG. Categories that live and die on shelf presence and in-store conversion should be leading this conversation, not watching it from the sidelines, treating retail media as a core channel in the plan rather than a test budget approved late and cut first.
The second is aligned measurement.
A shared vocabulary for what counts as success, so a campaign’s numbers mean the same thing whether reported by a retailer in the UAE or in Saudi Arabia.
The third is talent.
Retail media sits at the intersection of e-commerce, media buying, data science, trade and merchandising, a discipline that barely existed five years ago. Retailers are hiring for it faster than the market can supply it. A working group that pools training and builds a genuine talent pipeline is what will actually determine whether this region’s retail media ecosystem matures or stalls out.
“The window to build all three, together, is open now. It won’t stay open for long.”
Read more: Mazen Mroueh: Building Retail’s New Operating System
Mazen Mroueh is Head of Retail Media & Partnerships at Publicis Media Middle East, leading retail media network development across MENA. He specialises in first-party data, partnerships, measurement and ecosystem design, and is a frequent speaker, contributor and award juror.
Disclaimer: This article was originally written by the author. Views expressed are the author’s own. All rights belong to the original author.
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