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As digital adoption accelerates across the Middle East and Africa, advertisers face a complex mix of opportunity and regulatory challenges. The Trade Desk, a global programmatic advertising platform, is positioning itself as an alternative to big tech ecosystems, helping brands leverage data responsibly while maximising reach and impact.
Terry Kane, MD for the Middle East & Africa at The Trade Desk, discusses how the company is enabling advertisers to navigate the region’s fast-evolving media landscape, from connected TV and retail media to AI-driven automation, while prioritising transparency, brand safety, and measurable results.
How is The Trade Desk positioning itself in the UAE and wider MENA market, where advertisers are navigating both rapid digital adoption and a unique regulatory landscape?
The MENA region represents the future of innovation and opportunity, and we believe that we have a crucial role to play in shaping that future. Through smart use of data, The Trade Desk helps brand advertisers and agencies achieve their goals, publishers make more money, and consumers have a better online experience.
The Trade Desk is the alternative to big tech platform providers (Facebook, Amazon and Google), and our values are reflected in everything we do, from the way we work with clients, to the way we continue to evolve our platform.
We seek to create a more sustainable and ethical advertising ecosystem based on our values of trust, objectivity and transparency. Our only clients are advertisers. We don’t own any content. In that way we can retain complete objectivity. We will always work in service of finding the right ad impression, in the right channel, at the right time, at the right price, to meet a client’s marketing objectives.
In the Middle East and Africa, this approach is especially critical. The market is defined by both complexity and opportunity: on one side, we have advanced economies like the GCC, home to some of the world’s most sophisticated advertisers; on the other, we see high-growth African markets scaling rapidly.
Across the board, brands are looking to reach global audiences while demanding the highest standards of transparency, brand safety, and compliance with data legislation. Our platform brings these priorities together in one place: enabling precision targeting, brand-safe execution, and compliance at scale, across hundreds of trusted partners.
Everything we do is designed to add more value to the open internet than we extract from it.
With connected TV and streaming on the rise in the region, what role you are playing in helping brands shift budgets into this space effectively?
In the UAE, 65 per cent of residents watch streaming content daily which accounts for an average 11 percent of weekly time spent. Furthermore, people in MENA spend roughly 70 per cent of their online time on the open internet, outside big tech’s “walled gardens”, on news sites, premium video like Netflix or Disney and streaming audio. These statistics nowhere near match the digital ad spend in the Middle East today. This imbalance is costing brands more than they realise.
There is a massive opportunity to reach audiences where they actually spend their time, using data-driven and premium, brand-safe platforms. As consumer attention shifts, marketers need to rethink how and where they invest their ad budgets. Connected TV (CTV) should absolutely be part of the region’s digital mix, as the real power of CTV is big-screen impact, small-screen accuracy.
The most effective advertising is targeted. Smart and accurate use of data is the only way to target successfully. That is why we place it at the heart of our approach, making it easy for advertisers to apply data but also receive insights that encourage a positive cycle of improvement. The automated placement of digital ads using software and real-time data to deliver ads to precise audiences across various devices and premium channels is called programmatic advertising.
Programmatic advertising in MEA is projected to grow at a CAGR of 7.89 per cent over the next five years, making data-driven marketing strategies more powerful than ever. We work with a wide range of advertisers across the world, helping to connect them with premium publishers and quality advertising opportunities, ensuring brand safety and maximising campaign value.
We are here to help elevate the opportunity for both advertisers and publishers across the region. For publishers, greater automation of inventory unlocks new value and drives premium yields on content. For advertisers, it delivers deeper insights, stronger targeting and transparent reporting.
At the same time, there is a significant pool of global advertisers eager to reach the 350 million people across MENA. To capture this demand, the industry must rise to the challenge by expanding quality inventory, transparent reporting and embracing programmatic.
Retail media has been called the ‘third wave’ of digital advertising. How are you working with retailers in the Middle East to unlock this opportunity for advertisers?
Retail sales in the GCC region are projected to reach $386.9bn by 2028 with the sector growing at a CAGR of 4.6 per cent. The UAE and Saudi Arabia are expected to lead this growth, with CAGRs of 5.4 per cent and 5.1 per cent, respectively, solidifying the region as retail’s next global “hot spot”.
A crucial piece of the omnichannel puzzle, retail data turns consumer buying behaviour into actionable intelligence, enabling advertisers to target with greater accuracy, relevance and impact. Retail data will be an essential tool in any digital marketer’s toolbox, enabling marketers to precisely reach their audience throughout the buyer journey.
This retail revolution is challenging big tech’s walled gardens. While walled gardens keep their data locked behind closed doors, we’re helping advertisers leverage retail data to create a more open, transparent alternative.
Sitting underneath the retail media umbrella is offsite retail data. Simply put, this is where we safely utilise the retail data of a company and enable brands to use it in targeting across various different channels, like on television. This is particularly exciting for advertisers as it moves retail media from just being a “direct sales” media channel to a broader brand building opportunity.
Offsite retail data is a growth engine for the retail media category overall, which is the fastest growing form of ad spend with global spend expected to reach $140bn this year and comprising over 20 percent of total digital ad spend.
As consumers move seamlessly between online and offline worlds, retail data becomes the crucial bridge connecting these experiences. At The Trade Desk we use this powerful data to help advertisers truly understand the customer journey from digital ads to online and in-store purchases. This creates a more complete picture of advertising impact, allowing for smarter optimisations that drive real business growth, not just improved metrics.
Here in the Middle East, retail data is still a very new area of monetisation opportunity and one that will yield significant results and successes for those involved in making it happen. Activating data from retailers to reach the right audiences on the entire open internet provides powerful insights for targeting and measuring success.
We are proud of the progress we are driving in retail data, both globally and across the region, in partnership with some of the largest and most innovative brands such as Majid Al Futtaim. The opportunity in this space is immense, and we are committed to leading it. To accelerate our efforts, we have recently welcomed Mansour Salemeh, who previously led retail and ecommerce at Meta.
Data privacy is becoming a defining issue worldwide. How does The Trade Desk ensure advertisers in this region can use data responsibly while still achieving meaningful targeting and results?
The digital advertising ecosystem is at a critical juncture, transitioning from a cookie-driven model to one rooted in consent and transparency.
The future success of our industry and the open internet lies with alternative identifiers that respect consumer privacy while still supporting publishers to meaningfully monetise their advertising space. Clear, reliable, and consumer-centric identity is the most important challenge and opportunity for advertisers, shaping the future of relevance and precision in digital campaigns.
We need to transform the internet from an opt-out model to an opt-in environment. This will redefine the relationship between consumers and advertisers and empower users with greater control over their data.
Interestingly, UAE consumers show more willingness to share information with brands and retailers than consumers in key European markets. forty-nine per cent are willing to share their information with retailers and brands that they love, and 44 per cent would do so in exchange for a convenient and personalised ad experience. And 46 per cent of respondents agreed that to have a seamless shopping experience, they need to allow brands to capture some data. (Source: UAE FMCG Consumer Purchase Behaviour Study).
We are fully committed to advancing data privacy capabilities across the region. This includes working hand in hand with advertisers to ensure both GDPR and regional compliance, while also driving forward the identity agenda and UID strategy in collaboration with key partners.
Many advertisers here still lean heavily on big tech ecosystems. What are the biggest misconceptions about programmatic advertising on the open internet that you’re working to address?
Big tech still controls much of the advertising process: what people see, how it is measured, and what brands are told “worked”. Yet increasingly, the numbers they provide do not align with the real business results advertisers are experiencing.
The first major misconception is around where people spend their time. The reality is that people spend more than 70 per cent of their time outside social media platforms. Yet this is not where the majority of advertising spend goes. That gap represents one of the biggest disruptions in the industry today, and it is exactly the opportunity we are bringing to the market.
Globally we are seeing a renaissance in television advertising through CTV and in programmatic digital out of home. We are also witnessing early stage growth in personalised formats such as in gaming and audio advertising.
The second misconception, and one that is especially common in this region, is the belief that programmatic equals cheap or low quality advertising. Nothing could be further from the truth. At The Trade Desk, every channel is vetted to ensure brand safety, and we hold one of the strongest records in the industry for protecting advertisers.
According to an Adalytics report, we were the only major ad-tech firm that did not appear to route brand ads to “made-for-advertising” spam sites, and it distinguishes itself through stronger safeguards and inventory controls.
Our premium inventory partners include some of the most trusted and iconic household names in media such as CNN, Disney, Netflix, DAZN and Spotify, among many others. Programmatic is not about low quality. It is about accessing the highest quality channels at scale, with transparency and control.
Closed systems work best for those who control them and often at the expense of everyone else. The trade-offs are real. Illusory convenience or surface-level savings should not come at the cost of control. Big tech’s walled gardens are like all-inclusive resorts, convenient but limited. Smart brands, agencies, and advertisers know this. They’re demanding transparency, independence, and measurable performance from their media investments.
As the digital ad industry approaches $1tn, the shift is clear: the future of advertising is about control, choice and greater transparency not dependency on a few giant platforms. The most lasting solution is to leverage data-driven advertising on the open premium internet where real-time insights, precise targeting, and access to quality content in trusted environments offer the flexibility to respond to real consumer demand.
Looking ahead, how do you see AI and automation shaping The Trade Desk’s offering in the Middle East, and what does that mean for the future of transparent, data-driven advertising?
We were created to bring the same level of efficiency and transparency to digital advertising as can be found in real-time trading in financial markets. Our media buying platform is among the most advanced independent AI-driven platforms in the world, seeing more than one trillion ad opportunities per day, roughly 17 million ad opportunities every second, to ensure the right message, reaches the right person, in the right context.
Our platform is built differently than any other in the industry, using a unique approach that allows advertisers to bring in a wide variety of different variables and factors when buying advertising. It is designed to activate seamless omnichannel campaigns that reflect how people actually move between devices throughout their day.
From morning podcasts to evening streaming, we understand how people navigate digital life. We replace those frustrating repeated ads with fresh messages that respect consumers’ time and attention. The result is advertising that feels like a natural part of the digital experience, not an intrusion. Because the best ads don’t interrupt the consumer’s online experience. They enhance it.
We will continue to maximise the benefits that AI has to offer, but only when we are certain that they are additive to our platform experience. The company’s unwavering focus and investment in innovation has led to it being the partner to companies including Netflix, Spotify, Disney, Sky and the world’s leading brands including Unilever, P&G, Uber and McDonalds.
