Marketing & Advertising

The Industry That Sells Measurement Can not Agree on Its Own Size

Saudi Arabia's marketing sector is expanding on almost every estimate. The more revealing story is how far those estimates disagree, and who is quietly shaping what the growth will look like.

Ameer Albahouth

14 Oct 2026 • 5 min read

A sector with too many numbers

Marketing is the business of proof. Agencies in Riyadh now sell dashboards, attribution models, and conversion reports to clients who want every riyal accounted for. Yet ask how big the Saudi marketing industry is, and the answers do not line up.

A report prepared for GMedia, Saudi Arabia's media sector initiative, with Oxford Business Group, put national ad spend at SAR 9.4 billion (about $2.5 billion) for 2025, up 10.5% on the year before. Ken Research places the marketing and advertising agency market at $3.02 billion for the same year. IMARC Group, measuring the advertising market a year earlier, arrives at roughly $6.3 billion. Each counts something slightly different: media spend, agency revenue, or the whole advertising economy. None of them is wrong on its own terms.

But the gap is not a footnote. The highest figure is about two and a half times the lowest. An industry that tells its clients what cannot be measured cannot be managed has not yet settled on a shared measure of itself.

That is less an embarrassment than a clue. A market whose edges are still being drawn is a market where the rules matter more than the numbers.

Three rules that reshaped the field

The most consequential events in Saudi marketing over the past four years were not campaigns. They were regulations.

The first concerned who is allowed to advertise. In October 2022, the General Authority for Media Regulation introduced Mawthooq, a license required for anyone earning money from promotional content on social media inside the Kingdom. The Ministry of Commerce later extended the expectation to visiting influencers, warning businesses not to promote celebrities on visitor visas without the license. An overview published by Everything PR, citing a 2026 Kolsquare report, says the number of commercially active Saudi influencers fell by around 35% after Mawthooq took effect. If that figure holds, it means the creator economy was trimmed before it was allowed to grow again. The same GMedia report found that the creator economy still expanded 32% year on year in the first quarter of 2025, citing a study by Admitad and Stllr Network. Fewer people, more money. That is what a license does to a crowded market.

The second rule concerned where the industry lives. Saudi Arabia's regional headquarters program asked international firms seeking government business to base their regional operations in Riyadh. In 2021, the veteran advertising executive Sir Martin Sorrell told Arab News that the industry's center had moved from Beirut to Dubai and was now "moving to Riyadh." In 2024, dentsu MENA announced it had received its regional headquarters license and said it was the first of the major advertising holding companies to do so. That claim is the company's own.

The third rule concerned who does the work. The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development raised the Saudization rate for marketing professions in the private sector to 60%. The decision applies to establishments with three or more workers in the covered roles, which range from marketing manager and advertising designer to public relations specialist and photographer. It was announced for January 19, 2026, and enforcement began on April 19, 2026, after a grace period. A Saudi employee counts toward the quota only if paid at least SAR 5,500 a month.

Taken together, these three decisions answer the questions every market usually settles on its own. Who gets to speak. Where the business sits. Who sits at the desks.

Discipline arrives at the same moment

The regulatory shift has coincided with a change in client behavior. Writing in Campaign Middle East in January 2026, Ahmed Ghazi of Thabet Investment Company argued that 2025 marked a turn from visibility-driven campaigns toward accountable, performance-driven marketing. He described fewer large reputation campaigns, more mid-sized performance work, and a growing layer of small, always-on digital briefs from SMEs. He also described contracts increasingly tied to measurable outcomes rather than reach.

His most pointed observation concerned people. Ghazi wrote that talent scarcity, particularly in data, marketing technology, and performance roles, was pushing up wages and driving aggressive poaching, especially in Riyadh. This is an industry practitioner's view, not an audited finding. But it sits uncomfortably beside the new quota. A sector that already struggled to find specialists must now also ensure most of its covered roles are held by Saudis, at a set salary floor, while clients demand more proof for less money.

[INSERT: on-record comment from a Saudi agency founder or HR lead on how the 60% requirement has changed hiring since April 2026, with name, title, and agency verified]

It is possible to read this as pressure. It is also possible to read it as the reason the next generation of Saudi agencies may look very different from the last.

What the growth is actually made of

Most forecasts agree the industry will keep expanding, though not dramatically. Ken Research projects agency revenue growing at about 5.4% a year to reach $4.13 billion by 2031. Digital advertising is moving faster, with the same firm estimating it at $2.05 billion in 2025 and expecting it to roughly double by 2031. The GMedia report puts the Saudi ad-tech market, small today, on a path to more than triple by 2030.

These forecasts come from commercial research firms, and their methods are not fully public. Their direction is consistent. Their precision should be treated with caution.

What they describe, read together, is not simply a bigger version of the old industry. Money is moving toward software, data, and creators. Labor is being redirected toward Saudi professionals by law. Large international networks are relocating senior functions to Riyadh because government clients asked them to. The independent influencer economy has been converted into a licensed profession.

None of this is unusual in a country building new industries quickly. Governments often shape markets they consider strategic. What is distinctive here is how many levers have been pulled at once, and how directly they touch the one industry whose job is to shape public perception.

The question the numbers leave open

There is an old assumption that marketing follows the economy. Products appear, competition rises, and companies spend to be noticed. In Saudi Arabia, the sequence looks less tidy. The rules are arriving first, and the market is being asked to grow into them.

That makes the conventional question, how fast is the sector growing, the less useful one. The more interesting question is what kind of industry these rules will produce. One possibility is a sector with deep local talent, licensed and accountable creators, and agencies that compete on evidence. Another is a sector that complies well but innovates slowly, because its shape was decided before its players had the chance to discover it.

The answer will not show up in next year's market sizing reports. It will show up in who is still running an agency in Riyadh in five years, and whether they were trained in a market that rewarded them for thinking, or for fitting.

Sources

Calculation note: The "about two and a half times" comparison is Arabian Growth's own calculation, dividing IMARC Group's 2024 advertising market estimate ($6,281.4 million) by the GMedia and Oxford Business Group 2025 ad spend figure ($2.5 billion). The figures measure different scopes and years, which is the point being made, not a like-for-like comparison. The description of digital advertising roughly doubling by 2031 is derived from Ken Research's figures of $2,050 million (2025) and $4,156 million (2031).