Search Results for : Waseem Afzal

A year after what Goldman Sachs labeled the “the biggest M&A deal in the Arab World” i.e. the Amazon/Souq deal, Noon has announced its strategic partnership with US-based online auction platform eBay. About the deal The e-commerce platform, which saw a major investment from Alshaya late last year, will now fulfill eBay orders made on […]

With e-commerce being valued as a $10 billion industry in the GCC, it only makes sense for brands to jump onto the e-commerce bandwagon whether it’s through their own online stores or marketplaces. Moreover, moves by Amazon, Souq and Noon.com, are changing the rules of the game for retail. Where do agencies fit in? As […]

By Waseem Afzal, general manager of OMD MENA’s e-commerce arm, Transact Every year, Seamless Middle East brings together experts and businesses from all over the region to discuss the future and challenges of payments, fintech, e-commerce and retail. In its 19th edition, I had the opportunity to moderate a roundtable discussion with some of the brightest […]

Last year’s brand safety debacle brought to light some key issues with digital advertising. Among these were viewability and ad fraud. Ad fraud is rather self-explanatory, but what is viewability? Viewability is essentially an online advertising metric that determines if an ad is actually ‘viewable’, and then, allows advertisers to pay only for ads that […]

The year of mobile. Cross-device targeting. Geofencing. Personalized marketing. Identity-based targeting. The small screen revolution. These are just some of the phrases that do the rounds when people talk about mobile – if not digital – advertising. However, there seems to be a certain bubble surrounding mobile advertising in the MENA region, where smartphone penetration […]

Innovation is hard because ‘solving problems people didn’t know they had’ and ‘building something no one needs’ look identical at first,” said Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of enterprise cloud company, Box. While advertising may be able to do the latter, we’re not sure how good it is at the former. That’s probably why we’ve […]

The new digital trends 2015 research conducted in UAE from Microsoft has revealed that the modern consumer is putting pressure on brands to use personal information collected online to tailor services and help them get more done. The research – taken from Microsoft Advertising’s bi-annual Digital Trends report – found that 74.2 percent in the […]

The MENA region will outstrip Europe of its position as the second largest region for mobile subscribers by 2016, according to 2013 figures released by mobile and wireless industry think-tank, Portio. They show that, out of 396 million mobile subscribers in Arab states and 545 million in African countries, 71 million and 93 million, respectively, […]

  Compiling figures from IPG Mediabrands and the MAGNA Global Advertising Forecasts 2013 report, regional social video advertising platform Buzzeff recently stated that global investments into social video advertising have witnessed a growth of 37 percent in 2013, amounting to $8.26 billion. In the MENA region, it claims that social video advertising saw a 300 percent growth in 2013, when compared with the previous […]

  Last year, a YouTube video called “Somewhere In America #Mipsterz” sparked furious debate over young Muslims taking too much liberty with their faith. In the video, women in colorful headscarves pranced through forests, hopscotched along curbs and ledges, and skateboarded in high heels to the backdrop of American rapper Jay- Z’s “Somewhere in America“ […]

  Last year, Pepsi’s three-minute “Let’s Come Together” film for Ramadan was not only among the longest ads released in the Middle East for the Holy Month – with, presumably, a budget to match – but also the most watched video on YouTube outside of and in the MENA region, having clocked up close to […]