The Saudi Digital Advertising Maturity Framework, launched by Snap and Kearney, indicates an eight-percentage-point gap between the growth of digital ad spending and e-commerce growth in the Kingdom, highlighting an opportunity to enhance investment efficiency and link it more clearly to measurable business outcomes.

This gap does not provide a sole explanation for market performance, as e-commerce is influenced by multiple factors including the nature of each sector, evolving consumer behavior, and the distribution of purchases between digital and traditional channels. According to Abdullah Al-Hammadi, Managing Director of Snap in Saudi Arabia, this reflects the market's transition from a digital expansion phase to a more advanced phase focusing on effectiveness and measurement.

Al-Hammadi said in a special interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, 'Rising spending alone does not automatically lead to stronger business results,' explaining that the challenge is no longer limited to reaching the audience but is now linked to institutions' ability to connect strategy, content, consumer journey activation, data, and measurement within a single ecosystem.

Abdullah Al-Hammadi, Managing Director of Snap in Saudi Arabia (Snap)

Effectiveness Phase

Snap and Kearney developed the Saudi Digital Advertising Maturity Framework to help institutions assess their ability to convert advertising investment into measurable business outcomes, rather than looking at spending volume in isolation from other marketing elements.

The framework is based on four pillars: strategy, creativity, localization, consumer journey activation, data, and measurement. It does not assume that excellence in one pillar compensates for weakness in others, but rather focuses on how interconnected they are from the planning stage to the final evaluation of campaign impact.

Al-Hammadi points out that the goal is not to slow digital investment growth but to improve its efficiency, explaining that 'Saudi Arabia already has the digital infrastructure, consumer engagement, and growth momentum. The next opportunity is to ensure that advertisers have the degree of maturity, local relevance, and measurement discipline needed to turn this momentum into sustainable business results.'

This means the market does not face a problem in reaching the audience as much as it faces a challenge in determining whether this reach has led to a change in awareness, interest, purchase intent, engagement, or sales.

Varying Levels

Not all advertisers in Saudi Arabia start from the same point. Large local companies typically have resources, teams, and data that differ from those available to small and medium enterprises, while global brands entering the market face challenges related to understanding the local audience. The needs of government entities also differ from those of startups or e-commerce platforms.

Thus, the framework does not classify one pillar as the weakest for all advertisers. One institution may have a clear strategy but suffer from deficiencies in measurement, while another succeeds in producing locally relevant content without having a data infrastructure that demonstrates its commercial impact.

However, Al-Hammadi identifies two areas where there is clear room for improvement: consumer journey activation across all stages, and integrated measurement. He says some institutions are still building capabilities related to data, talent, and measurement tools needed to understand the real impact beyond the campaign's own performance.

This importance grows as digital platforms expand their role across the stages of discovery, consideration, conversion to purchase, and subsequent engagement, rather than being limited to brand awareness generation.

According to Snap, the Saudi digital advertising market is shifting from focusing on spending expansion to measuring effectiveness and commercial return (Reuters)

Interconnected Ecosystem

Limited campaign results are usually not linked to a single isolatable mistake. The content may be good, but the business objective is unclear, or the campaign is widespread without being connected to consumer journey stages, or plenty of data is available but not used to determine what actually drove the result.

Al-Hammadi notes that 'campaigns are more capable of achieving business results when strategy, creativity, activation, and measurement work together from the start.' When these functions operate in separate departments, the institution may achieve high numbers in reach, views, or engagement, but finds it difficult to determine each element's contribution to the final outcome or what should be scaled in subsequent campaigns.

This approach requires measurement to begin before the campaign launch, by defining the intended outcome, the appropriate indicators for it, and the data needed for evaluation. That transforms marketing from an activity based on sporadic campaigns into a continuous system where creative, technical, and commercial decisions are connected.

Local Relevance

Research results indicate that more than 30 percent of Saudi consumers find advertisements lack cultural relevance. This result does not mean that Saudi brands are ignorant of their market, but rather reflects the rapid change in audience expectations and their ability to recognize generic messages or those transferred from other markets.

Al-Hammadi explains that 'cultural relevance today goes beyond Arabic text or local images,' as it extends to the creative idea, language use, selection of content creators, platform experience, timing of brand presence, and the way audience engagement is measured.

Actual localization is not achieved by translating a global ad after its design is complete, but by incorporating an understanding of the Saudi market from the strategy-setting stage. This includes the nature of communication, differences between age groups, cultural and social moments, the platforms used by each audience, and what is considered natural or artificial in advertising discourse. Al-Hammadi adds: 'When relevance is designed across the entire marketing system, the work appears more natural to the Saudi audience and is more capable of turning into stronger business results.'

Cultural relevance is a key factor and goes beyond using Arabic and local images to designing the campaign from its inception (Getty)

Cross Channels

Some traditional measurement models rely on attributing credit to the last channel before the purchase, but consumer behavior is usually not linear. A consumer may discover a product on a social platform, then search for it, watch reviews, and visit a store or app before making a decision later.

According to Kantar's cross-media analysis in Saudi Arabia for 2025, approximately 70 percent of platform-driven impact in some cases came from interaction between multiple channels, not from the performance of a single platform in isolation. This percentage does not mean that every campaign achieves the same result, but it shows that a large part of the impact may result from how channels support each other.

The meaning of 'impact' varies depending on the campaign objective; it may include increased awareness, interest, or purchase intent, and may also be represented by engagement, website and app activity, leads, or purchases. Therefore, evaluating each platform independently may undervalue early interactions that contributed to shaping the decision, even if they were not the channel that recorded the final conversion.

One Goal