Beyond the Views: Gulf Influencer Marketing Moves Toward Measurement

The Gulf's influencer marketing market was worth an estimated $315.5 million in 2025, and P&S Intelligence projects it will reach $771.6 million by 2032. That implies a compound annual growth rate of 13.9%. Saudi Arabia supplied 40% of the 2025 total. The UAE is expected to record the fastest growth of any market in the region over the forecast period.

Trust does not divide evenly. A 2025 YouGov survey in the UAE found that 46% of men said they trusted products recommended by influencers or celebrities. Among women, the figure was 35%. For advertisers, that gap points to a wider problem: getting an audience to see a message and getting it to act on one are separate jobs. The second is harder.

Campaign mechanics have grown accordingly. Humanagement ran a Unilever campaign between April and July 2026 that used 72 creators across Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and YouTube, with activity in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Per agency-provided figures, the work produced more than 50 million views and 784,000 engagements.

Those are healthy numbers. They are also not proof of anything commercial. Views and engagement describe how many people saw something and how many responded in public; neither establishes purchase influence or a measurable return on the money spent. As spending rises, measurement stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a budgeting question.

Dina Assaf, regional campaign director at Nine71, frames the point directly. “What matters is what those views actually achieved for the brand,” she said. She recalled one campaign in which a creator with a smaller following drove more sales than influencers with much larger audiences. One case does not make a trend, but it does undercut the habit of buying reach by follower count alone.

What matters is what those views actually achieved for the brand,

The structure of the market already reflects some of that. P&S Intelligence estimated that micro-influencers held 45% of the GCC market in 2025, a share that speaks to how much reach now runs through smaller, more focused audiences aimed at specific consumer groups.

Creators, for their part, describe motives that are not purely financial. A 2025 InfluAnswer Arabia report by Weber Shandwick MENAT found that 49% of surveyed MENA creators named personal belief in a brand as a leading consideration when choosing a partnership. Brand reputation was cited by 42%, and financial compensation by 30%. Stated preferences are not the same as negotiated terms, though. What creators say they value and how deals are actually struck can diverge.

Geography complicates the work further. Local dialects, humour and cultural identity carry particular weight in Saudi Arabia, Assaf said. The UAE's mixed population raises a different set of linguistic and audience questions. Abeer Zakaria, senior account manager at Humanagement, pointed to cultural awareness, creative independence and the relationship between agency and creator as factors that shape a campaign. Cross-market differences make creator selection and content planning harder; an approach that lands with one audience may fall flat with another.

Artificial intelligence is now threaded through creator discovery, audience analysis and performance reporting. Creators are warming to it: the same InfluAnswer Arabia report found that 49% of surveyed MENA creators viewed AI positively, up from 29% a year earlier. Of those surveyed, 63% named more advanced tools and analytics among the technology's likely effects on the industry, while 41% raised deepfake concerns.

Tools that read audience data and flag potential creator partnerships can save time. They also raise questions about how accurate automated assessments are, and whether software can capture cultural context or judge an audience's credibility. Assaf's position is that judgement stays with people: when AI supplies the data, “experience tells us what to do with it.” Agencies have to interrogate machine recommendations rather than pass them through.

Regulation adds another filter. The UAE Media Council introduced its Advertiser Permit in July 2025 for qualifying individuals who publish promotional content on social media. Saudi Arabia's Mawthooq framework sets licensing requirements for individual advertisers covered by its rules. Compliance therefore shapes who is available for a campaign before creative questions even arise. Assaf said it is “part of how we select and work with creators from the very beginning.”

The direction of travel is not in dispute. Projections point to continued growth, and the budgets behind them are getting larger and more closely examined. What the sector is working through is a change in what it sells: not impressions, but a defensible account of what an impression did. That puts measurement, cultural fluency and legal literacy at the same table, three capabilities that rarely sat in the same department a few years ago.

The practical consequence is front-loaded work. A creator who clears licensing in one market may face different requirements in the next. Content that lands in Riyadh may not travel to Dubai unchanged. And a dashboard full of views says nothing about whether anyone bought anything. Each of those gaps has to be closed before a campaign goes live, not after the report lands.