EPISODE 06: Vinay Gangwani

Vinay Gangwani started his career in sales in India, and he says it still shapes how he reads advertising today. That commercial lens took him deeper into performance, e-commerce and measurement, and it left him with a habit most media people never pick up. Once you are accountable for revenue rather than media metrics, as he puts it, you realise "buying media is only one part of the problem". The questions that follow are the awkward ones. Is the attribution actually right. Can we connect what someone did on the ad to what happened in the app. Which numbers do I trust. He moved to Dubai after the pandemic expecting the region to look like the global acceleration everyone else had seen. What surprised him was how much of it stuck. E-commerce moved closer to the centre of the business, apps became the market rather than a channel in it, and expectations around convenience reset permanently. His sharpest correction is aimed at companies arriving from outside. The obvious mistake is treating the Middle East and North Africa as one market. The deeper one is localising your advertising without localising your operating model, because "changing your English to Arabic is not the most localised way to reach out to your customer". What actually has to change sits underneath: measurement frameworks, platform mix, the role of web versus app, the KPI hierarchy, how investment moves between markets. His formulation is worth stealing. Standardise the infrastructure, not the consumer. On technology he describes himself as having become "more technologically positive than technologically depressed", which is not the same as impressed. His first question now is what problem this solves and how we will know it was solved. You can build a genuinely sophisticated stack that never moves the business, and working close to commerce makes that obvious, because eventually there is a transaction. If four systems already disagree about what happened, a fifth dashboard is not the answer. The same test lands on AI, where he is bullish but specific: he is more interested in AI that improves the decision than AI that improves the presentation of the decision. Technology should be removing complexity from a decision, not adding a layer to it. The trend he thinks outsiders misread is the convergence of app, commerce and measurement. The app is still discussed as another place to buy targeting, when for a repeat customer it is the whole environment, storefront, loyalty, first party connection and the place the transaction actually happens. On that reading an install on its own means very little, and the work is connecting media, identity, measurement and commerce rather than generating more of them. Asked what he would build from scratch here, he says he would not build ad tech and he would definitely not build another dashboard, because there is plenty of technology telling us what happened and much less answering why, or what to do next. And asked what the region should be known for in five years, he is clear it should not be that MENA got good at copying what worked elsewhere. The ambition, in his words, should be to skip some of the legacy altogether. That needs measurement first, because automating more decisions on weak signals only produces bad decisions faster, then talent that does not fit neatly in one box, and then technology actually built here rather than the region being a sales market for someone else's. Quick-fire: \- MENA advertising in one word? Velocity \- The most overrated buzzword in AdTech right now? Omnichannel \- The most underrated opportunity in MENA AdTech? Measurement \- Relationships or technology, what matters more here? Relationships, any day \- One skill AdTech professionals in MENA must develop next? Unlearning Listen at builtformena.com. Every guest answers the same seven questions, so you can compare how the region's operators really think.