The last five years, a local fashion brand in Dubai attempting to compete with Zara or H&M would have required an enormous ad budget, a billboard on Sheikh Zayed road and a prayer. That same brand is now able to sell more of one product type than a multinational one in a single category today – with a correct influencer, a correct content and a correct 15 seconds on TikTok.
This is not an imaginary situation. It is currently occurring throughout the UAE and is transforming the way local companies are thinking about growing, competition and consumer trust.
The Drift off the Conventional Adverts
The UAE boasts one of the most robust social media penetration rates in the world – more than 98 percent of the population is on at least one platform. The most popular applications that take up the majority of daily screen time are Instagram, Tik Tok, Snapchat, and YouTube (among consumers between 18-35). Traditional media (print, TV, outdoor) is still relevant to the brands that want to target this audience, but it does not have the power it used to have.
The numbers back this up. Dubai Chamber of Commerce (2025) estimates in a report that UAE businesses have tripled digital marketing outlays annually and traditional advertising budgets are reduced by almost 12 percent. A massive portion of that amount spent online is being allocated to influencer collaboration, not as an experimental activity, but as a revenue source.
This is because it is simple, individuals believe people more than they believe logos. A creator recommendation of a product they subscribe to is more genuine than an optimized TV ad and it frequently outperforms.
Why Local Brands Surprisingly Have an Advantage
The global brands have the budgets themselves, the agencies, and the name recognition. However, in the MENA region, they frequently have nothing that local brands are full of cultural fluency.
The UAE market is a distinctly complicated one. It is a melting place of nationalities, languages, and consumer demands. A successful ad campaign in London or New York might fail in Dubai as it lacks the cultural touch even the tone of voice, the imagery, the timing of activities such as Ramadan, National Day or Eid.
Local brands have learned all of this on their own. And in the combination of said knowledge with the right local creators, in other words, the ones who speak both Arabic and English, who understand what content resonates in Abu Dhabi versus Riyadh, who can alternate modest fashion and streetwear based on their audience, they will produce campaigns that are native, not foreign.
This is one of the areas where worldwide amount of ad spending cannot be used to counter the lack of local knowledge.
The Heavy Lifting Is being done by the Micro-Influencers
Some people have a common belief that influencer marketing is having a direct conversation with a celebrity who has two million followers to hold up your product and smile at it. That model does exist but it is no longer the source of the actual results.
Local brands are achieving disproportionate results in the UAE through micro-influencers (10,000 -100,000 followers) and nano-influencers (under 10,000). Their following is less but much more active. A beauty brand collaborating with five micro-influencers in Kuwait and the UAE is likely to have more conversions in a few dirhams than one deal with a mega-influencer since the bonds between a micro-creator and their fans are more intimate and trusted.
The thing is, of course, how to locate the appropriate creators, filter the quality of their audience, and coordinate dozens of partnerships simultaneously. It is here that the technology has come to assume an overriding role.
The Impact of AI-Powered Tools on the MENA Brands
A one-time influencer campaign (finding influencers, negotiating, content evaluation, tracking, paying) may require weeks to be run manually. It is full-time running ten campaigns in the various markets of the gulf.
This is the marked increase in operations which is one reason why many UAE brands steered clear of this influencer marketing altogether or contracted it to agencies with high markups without showing the transparent outcomes seen in other well-managed brands.
That’s now changing. MENA-specific platforms such as MoonTech apply artificial intelligence to pair brands with creators according to demographics of the audience, quality of engagement, previous performance in a campaign, and cultural alignment, rather than the number of followers. Such platforms will also automatize the budget distribution between various campaigns, real sales (not only likes) and performance reports that indicate what each dirham accomplished.
In the case of a middle-sized e-commerce brand in Dubai, it will enable it to launch a Ramadan campaign using 20 creators in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait and track actual ROA spend in real-time. A couple of years back, such visibility and control was open only to companies whose agency retainer was in the six figures.
Ramadan 2026: Testing the Influencer-Led Marketing
The most commercially significant time of year regarding the brands in the MENA territory is Ramadan. There is an explosion in consumer expenditure on food, fashion, gifting and home goods. The most active after Iftar is the use of social media. Patterns of consumption of content change – people are now more accepting of more video content, content that appeals to the family and content that aligns to religious beliefs.
Global brands must be careful when engaging in Ramadan content, which involves hiring cultural consultants and readying various versions of the content through approvals. Brands with local creator’s speed dialing UAE based brands have a chance to reach audiences at their most receptive, and do it quicker and more authentically than any overseas competitor.
This Ramadan, among the most successful campaigns is not made by brands that have the largest budgets. They are being brought by national firms that realized the time, picked the right developers, and acted fast when bigger firms were still awaiting the approval of headquarters.
What It Takes to Compete in 2026
The brands currently thriving in UAE market have some common peculiarities. They also gauge performance based on actual sales and ROAS and not vanity metrics such as impressions or follower counts. They also collaborate with numerous smaller artists rather than putting all their eggs in one basket.
None of this involves the type of budget Nike or L’Oréal can invest in a market. Instead, it only needs a clear comprehending of who your customers are, where they are giving attention, and what creators already have their trust.
The Bottom Line
Influencer marketing is not a side-story or an appendix anymore in the UAE. To local brands, which know their market, it has made it the most effective way to get customers, brand loyalty, and competitive edge over the global players, who with significant deeper pockets, can afford to contend.
The tools are getting better. The creator pool is growing. And the young, connected, bilingual, and social-first audience is willing to purchase those brands that appear at the location they are already, with the voices they already trust.
Whether to invest in influencer marketing or not is no longer a question to businesses based in the UAE. Whether you can do without it is the question.
