EPISODE 09: Nandita Saggu (Liwa)

Nandita Saggu, Chief Growth Officer at Liwa, the Dubai creative and production house, joins Built for MENA, the podcast on what it actually takes to build, sell and scale AdTech and MarTech in the region. She opens with an admission: "I'm always in rooms full of people, but nothing has made me more nervous than this." Twenty-three years "at the intersection of creative data and tech", sixteen of them in the region, and by her own account "it wasn't straight at all": a PR and comms graduate who started in consulting, became the first hire for a German SaaS platform in Dubai, moved into AI "when nobody really even knew what AI was", then built growth functions across the agency world. "It's been six companies over the last 16 years in Dubai, but doing the same thing, building the growth function." She knew the region was different at 29. After months chasing a meeting with the CMO of a large retail group, she walked in and closed "a three-year multi-user, multi-module contract signed across the table in an hour. No scoring matrix, no RFP, no procurement". What it taught her, and what she has kept ever since, is "being authentic". The market still refuses a formula. She has seen "sales cycles anywhere from two days to one year", and the classic entry mistake is assuming one exists: "There is no procurement first local playbook that you can apply here." The deeper error is obsessing over the win. For Nandita, "it's not just about winning that account. It's about retaining it", and the proof is Liwa managing Emirates NBD for fifteen years. It is also how a creative agency won a 360 contract covering creative, SEO and paid media with a large healthcare player, now growing across its parent group, because "creative today is not just top funnel or awareness. It is driving outcome". Liwa's client list runs through federal and emirate governments, and those rooms changed how she pitches. You can find yourself "walking into a meeting with royalty on it", and "they're not going to be listening to you for more than 10 minutes". So "while everyone talks relationship, I'd challenge that". Her counter: "go in with something different, solve a problem". And forget treating the region as one market; each GCC country is "radically different in their needs". Outsiders see a tax-free paradise. "Everyone thinks Dubai is this land of miracles", she says, but what you find is "the hustle you have to face". Starting again, her one change is commercial discipline: "stop saying yes to free scope creep". On the next five years, she points to GenAI in the UAE, which she says has "experienced a massive uptick", and notes that "clients are already writing in AI use clauses into contracts". Agencies, she argues, are "at the cusp of automating our entire creative processes". Full episode and every previous conversation at builtformena.com. Quick-fire: Hustle · AI · First party data · Definitely relationships · Context