T here is a specific kind of meeting I have watched grow more common. It usually begins with a brief that landed the night before, a launch date decided before anyone asked what we were launching, and four words: “we need it yesterday”.
If you work in this industry, you know that meeting.
I have spent years in strategy and planning, and the single biggest shift I have watched take hold across the market is not a platform or a format or an algorithm. It is speed. The industry expects everything – the idea, the plan, the creative and the reaction to a competitor’s clever move – to happen now. Not soon. Now.
Speed feels like progress. And in a region growing as fast as ours, it can feel almost rude to argue against it. The Middle East is now the fastest-growing digital advertising market in the world, up nearly 18 per cent last year. Money is moving, brands are being built, careers are being made. Who has time to pause?
But here is what I have come to believe: the industry’s growing appetite for speed quietly threatens the one thing we are all paid to protect. Strategy.
Strategy is not a deck. It is not a template churned out faster than the agency down the road. It is what happens in the gap between a business problem and a creative answer: the thinking, the arguing, the throwing away of the first obvious idea because you know it is the obvious one. That gap needs time. And time is the first thing the market has learned to sacrifice.
When speed becomes the only measure, the pull is everywhere: to reach for the insight already at hand rather than the sharper one another day of digging would surface; to accept the idea that is fine because there is no room left to make it great; to mistake volume – more posts, more assets, more always-on everything – for impact. None of us are immune to that pull. The job of a good strategist, and a good agency, is precisely to resist it and, more importantly, to build the conditions that make resisting it possible.
The data has been warning us for years. Seven in ten marketers now describe themselves as stuck in short-term thinking. Yet the slower work of brand building delivers several times the long-term sales impact of the quick performance hit the market keeps defaulting to. We all know it. The real test is holding our nerve when the clock is loud.
That test is sharpest here, right now. We are young, fast and flush with the confidence of being the growth story everyone wants. Retail media alone grew more than 40 per cent last year. The temptation is to run faster still, grab the measurable win, treat every quarter like a sprint. But a market maturing this quickly needs brands with real substance, not feeds full of content made at speed and forgotten just as fast.
There is a human dimension too. When thinking time disappears, so do the thinkers. Curiosity has a speed limit, and so does good judgement. You cannot ask talented people to be rigorous and original while demanding everything before lunch and expect to keep them. Protecting the space to think is how leaders protect their best people.
None of this is an argument for being slow. Slow is not a virtue either, and clients have real deadlines and real pressure. This is where we sometimes misunderstand agility. Being agile is not the same as being quick at everything; true agility is knowing which brief needs the sprint and which needs the pause and having the judgement to tell them apart. It is the ability to change direction fast precisel…