What a Room Full of Global Brand Leaders Taught Me About Commerce Intelligence
June 15, 2026
A few weeks ago I sat in a room with brand leaders from across the region — licensees, operators, and category managers who between them oversee some of the most recognised consumer names on the planet. The conversation was convened by Authentic Brands Group, one of the world's largest brand management companies, with a portfolio that spans sports, entertainment, fashion, and lifestyle.
I was there to listen as much as to contribute. What I heard confirmed something I have believed for a long time: the gap between what commerce data can tell you and what most brands are actually doing with it is still enormous.
The Question Underneath Every Conversation
Every discussion in that room, regardless of the category or the brand, kept returning to the same underlying question: how do we know if our investment is actually working?
Not in the abstract sense of brand health scores or aided awareness. In the direct, commercial sense — is the money we are putting into digital, into retail, into content, translating into sell-through, into velocity, into margin?
That question is not new. But the urgency around it is. Brand leaders in 2025 are being asked by their boards and their finance teams to demonstrate commercial returns with a precision that traditional brand metrics were never built to provide. The language of marketing is shifting, and the data infrastructure many brands rely on has not kept pace.
Visibility Is Not the Same as Intelligence
One of the themes that came up repeatedly was visibility — specifically, how much brands were investing in gaining visibility on platforms and in retail environments, without having real clarity on what that visibility was actually worth.
There is an important distinction here that I find myself making often. Visibility is knowing you are present. Intelligence is knowing whether that presence is working, why it is or is not converting, and what you need to change to improve it.
Most brands in the MENA market have some level of visibility. They know their impression counts and their reach figures. Far fewer have the intelligence layer — the ability to connect that visibility to what is happening at the point of purchase, and to use that connection to make better decisions faster.
The Licensing Complexity Adds Another Layer
One dynamic that came through clearly in the ABG context specifically is the added complexity that licensing models introduce. When a brand's commercial performance depends on the execution quality of multiple licensee partners across different territories, the data challenge multiplies.
A licensor needs to understand performance not just at the brand level but at the licensee level, the channel level, and the territory level — simultaneously. That requires a data architecture and a reporting discipline that most licensing operations have not yet built.
The brands that are getting ahead of this are the ones treating commerce intelligence as a strategic function, not a reporting exercise. They are asking: what does good look like at every point in the customer journey, and how do we know when we are falling short?
What Strong Commerce Intelligence Actually Looks Like
From the conversations in that room and from the work I have done across this region over fifteen years, the brands that operate with real commercial precision share a few characteristics.
They have a clear view of their digital shelf — how their products appear, how they rank, how their content performs relative to category benchmarks. They do not treat listing quality as a one-time setup task. They treat it as an ongoing performance variable.
They connect their media investment to their commerce outcomes in a way that allows them to make real-time decisions — not end-of-quarter retrospectives. They know which campaigns are driving velocity and which are generating impressions that stop at awareness.
And they have a measurement framework that their commercial teams, their marketing teams, and their finance teams can all speak to. A shared language of performance that cuts across the internal silos that tend to keep data fragmented.
The MENA Opportunity Is Real — and It Rewards Clarity
The MENA market is one of the most exciting commerce landscapes in the world right now. The growth is real, the consumer base is young and digitally native, and the retail media infrastructure is maturing rapidly. Brands that show up with intelligence — that know their numbers, understand their category dynamics, and can move quickly when the data tells them to — will grow disproportionately.
The brands that show up with presence alone, relying on the market's tailwind to carry them, will find the ride getting rougher as competition intensifies and platforms become more sophisticated about which brands earn premium placement and which do not.
The roundtable reminded me why this work matters. There is no shortage of ambition in this market. The opportunity is in turning that ambition into precision.