008 - Mehdi Aroussi Azerion

Mehdi Aroussi, Senior Director of Global Partnerships and MENA Region at Azerion, joins Built for MENA, the podcast on what it actually takes to build, sell and scale AdTech and MarTech in the region. Sixteen years in digital, "and I still struggle to explain my job at family dinners". Mehdi started in Paris in 2010 as a media trader at Orange Advertising, working on Right Media and AppNexus at the beginning of programmatic in France, then moved to London on the SaaS side before joining HAWK in 2016 to build supply and data from scratch across mobile, audio, CTV, in-game and DOOH. For the past year he has been based in Dubai, bringing the full Azerion stack into the region. His first few weeks here, he thought he was failing. He ran the European playbook, dozens of meetings, everyone warm, everyone interested, then nothing. Complete silence. One Friday evening his phone exploded, campaigns approved, all of them needing to launch at once. In Europe the pipeline is a smooth slope. Here, "it can feel more like a light switch". He arrived thinking his job was to sell a DSP and quickly found that "my real job was market architecture". He sent close to 2,000 outreach emails and almost nothing came back. When he switched to coffees, dinners and asking people he already knew for introductions, things moved, because here "the relationship often comes before the business". His advice to anyone landing now is one line: "close your laptop and go to meet people". The structural version of that lesson is harder. You cannot build a market by pushing one product on one channel, so the agency, the publisher and the brand all have to be brought along at once, "a delicate triangle" where one nervous corner stalls the other two. In France that took four or five years of workshops, standards and stakeholder alignment before programmatic reached critical mass. "In MENA, I don't think we have five years." And where outsiders see a region catching up, Mehdi sees one "skipping a generation". Western retail media grew out of the desktop website. MENA is building it straight into its malls, which are not simply retail space but "the social fabric of the city", high-definition screens tied to point-of-sale data with mobile targeting on top. Which is why he lands on measurement. He thinks this region ends up exporting its models rather than importing them, but only if measurement gets consistent enough across markets to unlock global budgets. Full episode and every previous conversation at builtformena.com. Quick-fire: Accelerated · AI-powered · Retail in store · Relationships first · Arabic