--- title: "We Cannot Cap What We Cannot Count: MarkApp on What MENA Needs Before CTV Scales" url: https://adtech.lol/articles/c2932dc1-7ae6-4783-aed4-b3179c21ea2f source_url: https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2026/10/19/we-cannot-cap-what-we-cannot-count-markapp-on-what-mena-needs-before-ctv-scales/ source_site: exchangewire author: "Charlotte McEleny" published: 2026-10-19T00:00:00+00:00 tags: ["MENA", "CTV", "TV", "Social Media", "Advertising", "Digital Marketing"] publisher: AdTech Radar --- # We Cannot Cap What We Cannot Count: MarkApp on What MENA Needs Before CTV Scales > Ahead of ATS Dubai, Charlotte McEleny spoke to Sotiris Oikonomou of MarkApp about why the TV screen needs its own playbook in MENA and the unique challenges the region faces in scaling CTV. ![TV with measuring tape](https://cdn.exchangewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/TV-with-measuring-tape-image-1024x571.jpg) **_Ahead of ATS Dubai, Charlotte McEleny spoke to Sotiris Oikonomou of MarkApp about why the TV screen needs its own playbook…_** Video budgets in MENA followed audiences to Snapchat, TikTok, and Meta, and social video still accounts for most of the region's digital spend. CTV is next in the queue, and the temptation is to plan and buy it the same way. Sotiris Oikonomou, managing director at MarkApp, thinks that would be a mistake. The ad tech company works across CTV, mobile app, and web inventory, and has spent the past year building out its own platforms: an AI agent layer for its Pantheon contextual marketplace in September 2025, followed by the launch of the Harion omnichannel DSP in January. Ahead of his session at ATS Dubai, Oikonomou spoke to ExchangeWire about why the TV screen needs its own playbook, what the region gains from arriving after the US and Europe, and what publishers and buyers need to fix first. #### Video spend in MENA went to social first. Where does CTV sit on that path? ![Sotiris Oikonomou](https://cdn.exchangewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Sotiris-Oikonomou-300x300.jpeg)**_[Sotiris Oikonomou](https://www.linkedin.com/in/oikonomousotiris/), Managing Director, MarkApp_** First, MENA has been getting into CTV in the last couple of years. MENA is a market dominated by social media and social video, in particular, which has become a hot topic and something everyone wants to invest in. Just because CTV is video doesn't mean the MENA market, or any other market, has to adopt the same methodology, patterns, or mindset when running a campaign on CTV as on social video. TV is a passive medium when you consume content, while social media is active; you engage. Over the last year, the MENA market scaled its budget by about 18% year on year, and social media accounted for 60% of that growth. We also saw significant growth in CTV, but there's still plenty of room to grow because the market hasn't fully adopted it yet. Compared with other markets, the US is the dominant market, followed by Europe, yet about 9% of users aged 18 to 34 use their smart TV as their first screen for consumption. So we see huge potential for growth and a huge need for adoption of the technology. #### Your ATS session will argue that the living room is not a social feed. What changes when someone is watching from the sofa instead of scrolling on their phone? We're talking about two different types of user targeting here. On the one hand, we have the household, which is the TV screen. So we're talking about multiple people, a group of people under the same roof with similar habits, or not. On the other hand, when we talk about a phone, which we use all the time now, on social media, in mobile apps, and sometimes on the web, we are talking about one specific user behind one screen. So we need to understand that these are two different paths. In MENA, for example, TV viewership scales a lot during Ramadan, and targeting the TV screen during that period is really different to targeting, for example, a TV show. They are two different types of targeting on the same device type, and you have to adjust to different attention metrics at that level. Mixing the two can lead to bad outcomes. #### What does that mix look like for someone planning and buying CTV? When we're talking about CTV buyers, we need to place caps not only at the device level, but also at the content level and the channel level. With users on mobile, we go by device because we're targeting one person. The formats are completely different too. On mobile, we used to have six-second videos, while on TV videos are longer. Any mix leads to the wrong level of targeting and attention, and wrong judgments about campaign performance and KPIs. It alters our expectations and leads to different, inflated CPMs, which is a completely wrong conclusion. That's why we see rates fall from the highs they were at in CTV many years ago. For example, a USD$30 (£22.53) CPM; now the same publisher has, for example, a USD$5 (£3.75) CPM. One thing I want to highlight is that, in the Middle East, we have high attention and high ad recall, based on the IAB research papers we released last year. That means that with the right investment and solid CTV infrastructure, the results will be huge and will drive incremental growth in the region over the next three to five years. #### As buying moves away from cookies and towards content and context, what does that mean in practice for how campaigns are planned, targeted, and measured? We have two different mindsets here that shouldn't mix, and two different targeting options. First, TV never had cookies, and we should never put TV in the same basket as website cookies. The targeting signal here isn't the user, as it has been in traditional marketing for years, and even on social media, the dominant platform in this market. The signal is the content, and that's what we need to start building in the region: on the publisher side, the signals to pass, and on the buyer side, the signals to buy. So targeting a Saudi league football game is different from targeting a drama series. We need to target the channel. We need to target the geographic area. We need to target the network that sends us the traffic, meaning the publishers, to avoid duplication, and we need to target everything that is declared in the bidstream. This will help us understand reach, KPIs, and the geo holdout, and how a different targeting area, for example Dubai, will perform compared with Abu Dhabi. We can measure this with post-ad recall surveys and on-site sales. These are the key pillars that differentiate CTV and how we will target it. Plus, we are in a market heavily affected by Ramadan, and many advertisers use dayparting. Dayparting is also a key year-round tool, and we should account for it. #### If agencies are happy with how their social spend performs, what's the barrier to moving budget into CTV? Is it education or proof? I would say it's a combination of both. On the one hand, social dominance keeps budgets close to social media because that's the proven channel and where the market is educated. CTV still isn't fully verified or understood by everyone, and the market doesn't yet trust it enough to run big budgets there and focus on this channel. On the other hand, look at the most developed CTV market, the United States. Almost 60% of buyers there believe – I won't say they know, I'll say they believe – that their CTV runs ads with the best targeting and the best deals, and that's why they let about 30% go into the open exchange. What we need to develop in this market, to verify the inventory and to educate both supply and demand, is a declared supply path; a household-level plan, which is not yet well established because we still miss the household multiplier on reach, and that's something IAB MENA will work on intensively in the next months to release, because it's really important and all the big markets out there have it; and a geo holdout. With all this in place, I believe the market will follow, and we will see a slow transition from social media to the CTV environment. One test that could help us verify that attention is a big part of CTV would be a Riyadh test in Saudi: post-campaign measurement on a geo holdout and local on-site sales. I mention Riyadh because it is also a major financial centre in the Middle East, and we can drive significant retail sales there. #### MENA is coming to CTV after the US and Europe. Which of their mistakes should the region avoid? Everyone makes mistakes, even the biggest market players, like the US. But MENA shouldn't be disappointed to come third, if not fourth, in the race for CTV, because we can see what mistakes the first two regions, the US and Europe, made, what we should avoid, and how we can do better. That's always the benefit of not coming first, and it's one of the best benefits you can have. One critical issue the US is facing right now, according to DoubleVerify, is that CTV fraud schemes scaled by 140% in Q1 2026 alone. This percentage is terrifying. So what should be avoided here in MENA? We must not scale before proof. We need to understand verification. We need to understand the dangers of invalid traffic, misrepresentation, and similar patterns that can harm the industry and the marketplace. With such excitement, mistakes can happen and seriously hurt the business's longevity. #### Where else does the CTV supply chain break down? We need to audit and verify all the reseller paths. In the meantime, we have many resellers, including many unaudited ones, beyond those declared in the supply chain, and we still need to understand them. Publishers need education, and so do buyers. We need to avoid reselling one TV through five, six, ten resellers, because that hurts incrementality and adds risk at the end of the day. We get the wrong frequency caps, we have a huge stack of fees, the CPMs are inflated, and the publisher receives no actual profit in the end. Other than that, we have lots of technical mistakes out there. We see many mobile devices sold as TV, whether they are tablets or not, and TV devices that connect and send requests to monetise the placement are mislabelled as mobile in the bidstream. These small mistakes can hurt the industry and its growth at scale. We also see that when publishers don't share data, buyers aren't confident buying the inventory. Sometimes publishers start with rates they think the inventory is worth, but they don't sell it at all because buyers aren't satisfied with what they receive, what they see, or the targeting. So they need to go from USD$20 (£15.01) to USD$5 (£3.75) just to cover the supply and have a revenue stream. And the multiplier is not yet in place. That's still a big issue in the local market. The US and the UK have it, and they have specific tools for this metric, so they can count reach. Right now in MENA, we cannot cap what we cannot count, and we must audit the path. These are the main elements I think we should solidify before we move forward. #### Looking ahead a couple of years, what do publishers, buyers, and bodies like IAB MENA need to do to mature the market? The industry should follow three paths and guidelines: one for buyers, one for publishers, and one from IAB MENA, a task force that brings together all market players so you can hear everyone's voice as we work together on the same path. Publishers should start by declaring everything in the bidstream: the SupplyChain object, the content data, and verification of the ad's environment. We see that publishers are not yet familiar with what the SupplyChain object is and how to pass it, or with the content metadata: the content name, the content rating, the configuration, the episode, the genre. We should verify that for buyers so they understand where the ad is going. In linear TV, when someone runs an ad, we don't have these metrics, but CTV is TV on steroids, so we want this data back for buyers. Buyers and agencies must avoid the mistakes we discussed, like targeting per user device as they do on mobile. They should target per household, and cap per environment or per channel. They should also ask questions that, for me, are key to moving forward. What content will the publishers sell them? How many reseller hops are part of it? Does the content match the OMID parameters and the OM SDK from IAB Tech Lab so they can verify it's a legitimate environment? And many others before they go forward. The last one is IAB MENA, a joint task force that definitely needs to be part of it. First, we need to establish the multiplier for reach and the household. We need a framework for the supply chain. Another key market development is that CTV also carries Arabic content, so we need a language-based classification standard for that content, and everyone needs to adopt it. We should approach all this from three different angles. The budgets are there, and the market wants to adopt it, so I don't think the region or the supply side is the issue. The region needs education and a proper framework to build standards on top of that. #### _Sotiris will be speaking at ATS Dubai on Thursday 26th November._ Source: [https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2026/10/19/we-cannot-cap-what-we-cannot-count-markapp-on-what-mena-needs-before-ctv-scales/](https://www.exchangewire.com/blog/2026/10/19/we-cannot-cap-what-we-cannot-count-markapp-on-what-mena-needs-before-ctv-scales/)