Localise or hit the road, From a digital marketing point of view
Serial disrupter, Fahed Moubarak has been on the forefront of the ever-evolving Marketing landscape for over two decades. Backed by meticulous data and research, Fahed has been pioneering innovative technological advances in regional Marketing and Advertising across the Media, Real Estate and Entertainment sectors and beyond. His superpower is his innate ability to understand his audience and create localized value.
Championing localized attribution marketing in the Middle East, Fahed, DMS’s Business Director, identified tremendous potential to add value to regional markets, especially the underserved Egyptian demographic and set out to radically transform the way markets and advertisers viewed performance marketing.
Fahed has been stewarding the programmatic capabilities in the Arab world by ideating and launching an outcome-based solutions laboratory for DMS called InMotion that enables brands, advertisers, and agencies to grow audience reach and new demand onboarding capabilities – primarily through interpreting data and operation metrics.
While outcome marketing is not a novel concept and has been in play in the developed markets over the past decade, global tech giants armed with the most advanced tools have historically stumbled in the region, unable to deliver results and sway sentiment. Their Achilles heel – not knowing the market well enough to customize quickly. This agility is precisely what Fahed has equipped DMS with through the launch of InMotion.
As a marketer who thinks like an engineer, Fahed built the tools to distill regional big data and achieve the granularity that is key to producing effective localized solutions. Connecting strictly the demand to the supply side platforms while accurately understanding, translating, onboarding, and customizing the data is what DMS pioneered in the regional market.
For the first time, marketers in Egypt and the Middle East, were able to be positively influenced to embrace advanced technologies as they could finally understand their customers and their competitors’ customers based on their real-world interests – elevating DMS’s standing in the region from a media representative organization to a comprehensive media solutions-provider.
Unlike the competition who traditionally define audience segments from inferred interests gleaned from website visits and social media engagement, InMotion equips marketers with a scientific, metric-driven degree, brand new approach in collecting accuracy related to audience’s behaviors and hence, empowers them to improve and maintain customer loyalty.
This pioneering outcome-based marketing initiative has already positively impacted Egypt’s marketing capabilities and uplifted the region’s programmatic performance and access across diverse sectors such as Real Estate, Banking, Telco Operators and Automotive, with DMS now setting their sights on the public sector both, in Egypt and the region. InMotion has tangibly and visibly positioned itself as the leader and future of marketing in the MENA geography.
Before joining DMS, Fahed was already setting trends and influencing the marketing world in the Middle East. He leveraged his expertise in Adtech, Martech, analytics and data science, and was the driving force behind the region’s leading mobile advertising network – Maddict – with over 1 billion monthly direct ad requests targeting over 22 million unique users. Creating a rich media one-stop shop for brands to maximize their mobile marketing strategies across the MENA region, Fahed was instrumental in supporting global names to access local audiences.
He also created the region’s first OOH measurement platform that was readily welcomed by the marketing community. On the back of extensive research and data from over 30 million unique users in the GCC, Fahed designed the proprietary software that was able to plan, measure and analyze static and digital OOH media campaigns – resulting in optimized spends, quicker conversion to sales and improved ROI.
Harnessing the power of big data and technology has never been more important in creating the future of Marketing in this region – and Egypt is a critical piece of that marketing map. With the largest online market in MENA coupled with the fact that the country is the de facto media hub of the Arab world, Egypt has phenomenal potential for growth that is yet untapped by global actors.
Tapping into big data at a local level and being able to accurately measure and attribute campaign performance, allows marketers to engineer their strategies and playbooks to not only efficiently reach to their core target audience but also to create sustainable value by democratizing and ultra-personalizing their messaging.
Ushering in greater reliance on tech-augmented analytics, accurate measurement and localizing ad networks, Fahad has been spearheading Martech capabilities in the region. His research-driven thought leadership and experience has been consistently providing sharper insights into effective identity marketing – and ultimately ensuring that proverbial bang for every buck spent!
Fahed Moubarak is Business Director of DMS, the digital arm of Choueiri group.
