In Saudi Marketing, the Talent Has Started Writing the Brief

In November 2025, Saudi Arabia's General Authority for Media Regulation published its monthly count of licenses. It had issued 152 professional certificates to journalists. In the same month, it issued 711 Mawthooq licenses, the permit that allows an individual to publish advertising through their own social media accounts. For every journalist the regulator certified that month, it licensed nearly five people to advertise.

That ratio says less about journalism than about marketing. Since October 2022, when businesses were told to stop working with unlicensed advertisers, a person who earns from promotional posts in the Kingdom has been a licensed commercial actor. The license comes with conditions: ads must be clearly marked, accounts must be registered with the authority, and the regulator can halt an ad on request. The state turned the influencer into a business before many influencers had decided to become one.

Some of them have gone further. They are not only holding licenses. They are founding and running the companies that marketing budgets flow through.

The Companies That Started as Channels

Telfaz11 was founded in Riyadh in 2011 by Alaa Yousef Fadan, Ali Al Kalthami, and Ibrahim Al Khairallah. It began as a YouTube-first network aimed at Saudi youth, with Al Khairallah working as a comedian and creative lead. In time it added a commercial arm producing work for brands including STC, Uber, and IKEA, according to Dealroom, raised a $9 million Series A, and moved into feature films. Its comedy Sattar earned nearly $11 million in Saudi cinemas in 2023, according to the Arab Cinema Center's profile of Fadan. The company never stopped being a creator. It became a place brands went to for a creator's sensibility.

Abdulrahman Abumalih took a different route. He started the podcast Fnjan in the mid-2010s as its host and producer, then founded Thmanyah in 2016 as the umbrella for it and later productions. The company added a hosting service for podcast advertising and publishing. In 2021, Saudi Research and Media Group, which owns more than 30 outlets including Asharq Al-Awsat and Arab News, bought 51 percent of Thmanyah for SAR 33.31 million, according to SRMG's exchange filing. Thmanyah later reported that a single Fnjan episode passed 100 million YouTube views in just over a year, a figure the company announced itself.

The pattern reaches smaller names too. Omar Hussein, a comedian whose web series 3al6ayer ran on Uturn's network, co-founded a social media marketing and production agency in 2019.

None of these founders positioned themselves as replacements for the agency. They simply held something agencies had spent years renting: an audience that trusted them, and an instinct for what that audience would sit through.

What the Agency Used to Own

For most of its history, a marketing agency sold two things. It sold access, the ability to put a message in front of people through media it bought. And it sold judgment, the ability to decide what that message should be. A creator reverses the order. The access is already theirs, built one post at a time, and the judgment is the reason the access exists. An audience that follows a person for years is, in effect, a long record of that person's judgment being tested in public.

That is why a creator-led firm can feel unfamiliar to a traditional client. Its main asset goes home at the end of the day. It cannot be fully captured in a credentials deck. The founder's taste is not a service line. It is the product.

Regulation has made this sharper. Mawthooq rewards creators who behave like accountable businesses. It also requires non-Saudi creators to work through locally licensed agencies rather than independently. The same rules that turned Saudi creators into businesses also guaranteed a place for intermediaries. The license did not remove the middle of the market. It decided who was allowed to stand there.

The Numbers Tell a Smaller Story

It is tempting to read all of this as money moving from agencies to creators. The figures do not quite support that. Saudi Arabia's marketing and advertising market reached about $3.02 billion in 2025, according to Mordor Intelligence figures cited by Mubasher. Statista projected the Kingdom's influencer advertising at $95.69 million for the same year. Set side by side, influencer ads come to roughly 3 percent of the total. Different firms measure differently, but the gap is too wide to explain away.

Within that slice, the money is concentrated. Kolsquare reports that 60 percent of influencer spend in the Middle East and North Africa still goes to macro and mega influencers. Saudi Arabia accounts for roughly 40 percent of the GCC influencer market, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.

So the shift is not mainly about budgets. It is about where ideas of good marketing now come from. A brand in Riyadh may still spend most of its money on media and production, yet its reference points for what content should feel like increasingly come from people who built audiences themselves. Creators are shaping the industry less by capturing its spending than by setting its grammar.

A State That Treats Content as an Industry

The government has been explicit that it sees content as an economic sector. At the Saudi Media Forum in February 2026, Minister of Media Salman Al-Dossary announced 12 initiatives, including a Media Innovation Camp with the Saudi Data and AI Authority, framed partly around helping media entrepreneurs build sustainable business models. He also said the Kingdom would host more than 2,000 creators and influencers from 90 countries at the second Impact Makers Forum in Qiddiya. That is the vocabulary of industrial policy, not of a talent show.

Institutional support, however, brings its own pressure. A creator who becomes a founder takes on clients, salaries, and the expectations of partners and investors. Telfaz11 answered by becoming a studio. Thmanyah answered, in part, by joining a larger media group. Both paths are reasonable. Both also show that a creator's company eventually has to decide whether it is built around one voice, or around a system that can produce many.

When the Advisor Is Also the Channel

There is a tension inside the creator-led firm that the industry has not fully named. A creator who advises a brand on strategy may also be one of the channels that strategy recommends. The same person can diagnose the problem and sell the remedy. Traditional agencies manage that conflict, imperfectly, by separating planning from buying. In a firm built around one person, the separation depends on character more than structure.

Mawthooq governs disclosure on the post. The harder disclosure, when advice and inventory come from the same person, is left to the firm.

The Question That Changed Places

The traditional agency began every campaign with a question about other people: who should we hire to say this? The creator-led firm begins somewhere more personal: would I say this, to people who have listened to me for years? It is a narrower question. It may also be the one marketing was always meant to ask.

What remains to be seen is whether that question survives a payroll, a board, and a growing client list. Or whether every creator who builds a company eventually becomes the kind of firm that once booked them.