There's a specific fear that stops a lot of marketing leaders from going all-in on AI, and it's a legitimate one. It goes like this: if I let my whole team use these tools freely, everything we publish will start to sound the same as everything everyone else publishes. The brand voice we spent years building will dissolve into that smooth, competent, faintly robotic tone that you can now recognize instantly across half the internet. The fear is real. But the answer is not to ban the tools, and it's not to let one person be the gatekeeper for everything. The answer is to roll AI out in a way that protects voice by design. Having done exactly this with my own team, here's how I think about it. Why AI erodes voice by default First, understand the mechanism, because you can't defend against a problem you don't understand. Large language models are trained to produce the most probable, most broadly acceptable response. That's their nature. Left to their defa...
I've spent much of my career marketing across the Middle East and North Africa, and I've watched a lot of global brands and international marketers arrive in the region with a playbook that worked beautifully everywhere else and then quietly underperform here. Not because the marketers were bad, they were often excellent, but because they treated MENA as a single translation exercise: take what works in the home market, swap the language, adjust the media plan, and go. MENA punishes that assumption. It's one of the most diverse, fast-moving, and misunderstood marketing environments in the world, and the things that make it distinctive are exactly the things a global playbook tends to flatten. Here's what those playbooks most often get wrong. Treating MENA as one market The first and most fundamental error is in the acronym itself. "MENA" groups together countries that differ enormously in wealth, media habits, dialect, religiosity, regulatory environment, c...