The Personalization Imperative: Driving telecom growth with AI-powered marketing

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, April 2025

by GP Singh, Mahmoud Makki, Tarek Matar, and Ankit Kushwaha




Customers in every industry are demanding personalized, real-time engagement across channels, whether it is social media, mobile apps, or retail stores online and offline. They expect to be uniquely understood in the moment.

Marketers know that personalization is critical to relevance and differentiation, revenue growth, and brand value. Leaders are tackling this challenge head-on. First, they are gathering massive, proprietary data sets of customer information. Unilever, for example, is on a mission to create 1 billion one-on-one customer relationships by analyzing interactions across digital and in-store touch points for marketing insights. Second, such leaders are creating integrated marketing technology (MarTech) stacks to enable real-time personalization. McDonald’s integrated its MarTech to deliver personalized drive-through menus, mobile app offers, and in-store experiences, increasing its digital customer frequency by 10 percent and raising customer spending. Third, these leaders are exploiting real-time insights to get their concept into the market faster. Such agility allowed Coca-Cola to quickly move from a concept to the production of personalized bottles and cans in its “Share a Coke” campaign, which it launched in Australia and then expanded globally, and grow sales by 2.5 percent in a year in the competitive U.S. market.

Telecom operators are uniquely positioned to fulfill the personalization imperative. Their data sets, which include real-time location data, usage patterns, and customer service interactions, are broader and richer than those of industries such as finance or retail.

The problem is that many telecom operators are struggling to tap this gold mine of insights. In many cases, they are unable to deliver the right offer at the right place and the right time to their customers. We find that telecom companies typically utilize only 30 to 50 percent of their data. Senior telecom executives worry that disconnected MarTech stacks and skills gaps are holding them back.

Data-fueled, AI-powered marketing engines can unlock the potential for personalization. Such engines can produce the insights needed for personalized engagement, promote more informed decisions, and create the precision targeted strategies needed to enhance returns and deliver competitive advantage. Our analysis shows that for telecom companies in the early stages of their customer value management (CVM) journey, every $1.00 invested in AI-powered, data-fueled marketing can yield up to $5.90 in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) gains over five years. (Read the rest here.)

Film and beyond: Leapfrogging into the global screen industry

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BroadcastPro Middle East, February 5, 2025

by Tarek Matar, Karim Sarkis and Maansi Sagar



Ongoing transformation in the global screen industry has created an opportunity for GCC countries to establish themselves as prominent players. As the industry grapples with the future of content creation and the demands of a global audience, the combination of an appetite for investment in state-of-the-art technologies and media hubs, a focus on attracting investors and producers, a young and digitally-savvy workforce, and a culture rich with stories and landscapes could enable the GCC region to become a centre of cinematic innovation. Success in this endeavour will require a collaborative effort between governments and the private sector to bridge the silos of geography, technology and media industry verticals.

The screen industry, which has expanded beyond movies and movie theatres, is facing the uncertainties that accompany the impact of new technologies on its production value chain, particularly GenAI (simply defined here as artificial intelligence that can generate video content from text, image and video prompts). Video tools like Runway and Meta’s Movie Gen, along with virtual production and other advancements, are raising questions: Will content be generated versus filmed? Will soundstages and physical locations still be needed? What talent and skills will be essential? How will budgets and timelines be affected?

Creatives are soul-searching. Infrastructure investors are hesitating. Media conglomerates are experimenting. Big Tech is pouring billions into new tools. Yet the value is there to be captured. Strategy& forecasts that global video revenues – cinema, OTT services and TV – will increase by approximately $165bn to $564bn by 2028.

Simultaneously, audience and economic dynamics are changing, driven by shifting viewer preferences and industry budgetary pressures. Audiences are fuelling demand for locally-produced content as they search beyond the once-dominant Hollywood-centric model in search of relatable storytelling, cultural representation and authentic experiences. Film producers must do more with less as distribution and streaming platforms focus on profitability and tighten their budgets, thus making cheaper international content more appealing.

This uncertainty and the changing dynamics create an opportunity for the GCC’s forward-leaning economies to position themselves as a global film production hub with five actions. Read the rest here.

Redefining the social contract: Policy options for economic inclusion and fiscal sustainability

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PwC Strategy& Middle East, January 2025

by Chadi N. Moujaes, Sami Zaki, Mitcha Sleiman and Dr. Steffen Hertog

Following the 1970s oil boom, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)1 countries developed a generous welfare model offering a wide range of benefits to nationals, including public-sector employment, energy subsidies, a variety of non-means-tested categorical benefits, and free public services such as education and healthcare. Governments now understand that this implicit social contract needs reform, given fiscal constraints and demographic pressures. 

Although GCC governments are responding to this challenge, thus far reforms have been piecemeal. Creating a new social contract requires simultaneous fiscal reform, welfare modernization, and labor policy changes. Moreover, governments need to design and implement the contract components specifically for each country’s needs. 

There are five policy tools that GCC governments can consider as they redesign their social contracts, described below: 

• Permanent income supplements for lower earners can make private-sector employment more attractive to nationals. Such income support ensures that the shift away from public-sector employment does not result in “working poor.” 

• Active labor market policies, including lifelong learning, job services, and training, can support nationals’ integration into the private sector. 

• Universal basic income (UBI) can provide all nationals with income security, while maintaining incentives for private-sector entrepreneurship and work. 

• Means-tested social benefits can support those that need it most, while reducing welfare dependency and fraud. 

• Integration of foreign residents through dedicated welfare tools, such as a modest minimum wage, can attract and ensure a ready workforce of foreigners, while reducing the differential in labor rights and costs that discourages employers from hiring nationals.

A new social contract in GCC countries can provide opportunities to all nationals, guarantee basic welfare for all, incentivize and improve the rewards for private economic activity, ensure fiscal sustainability, and minimize economic distortions. Read the full report here.

GCC economies must plot their way to $1 trillion in non-oil exports

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Gulf News, December 9, 2024

by Rasheed Eltayeb, Chadi Moujaes, Paul Saber, and Sohaib Dar



GCC governments are making progress in reducing their reliance on oil revenues and building an export base of high-value-added goods and services. To accelerate the shift away from oil exports to non-commoditized goods and services, GCC countries can expand their industrial base beyond petrochemicals, support high productivity sectors, and enter competitive markets.

Exports of non-oil goods have grown by a compound annual growth rate of 2% over the past ten years. The World Bank’s latest Gulf Economic Update estimates that GCC non-oil GDP growth reached 3.9% in 2023, while oil-generated revenues contracted by the same percentage.

With the correct measures, we estimate that GCC countries could accelerate this growth and increase total 2022 non-oil exports worth $202 billion to $1 trillion annually by 2030. Our $1 trillion figure comes from: past export growth, GCC countries’ revealed comparative advantage (RCA) in key export sectors (which means they sell abroad significant amounts from that sector), and extrapolating top quartile export growth manifested by global benchmarks.

To capture this prize, GCC policymakers can take three sets of actions. (Read the rest here.)

Reinventing the Gulf region

Learned a lot about the challenges facing GCC governments and how to address them lending an editorial hand here:

Strategy& Middle East Ideation Center, April 2021





The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated and amplified the economic, social, and environmental challenges facing the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Pre-pandemic, these countries had initiated significant reforms that allowed them to respond in a more resilient, dynamic, and digital manner. Now, the GCC governments have an opportunity to elevate their economic, institutional, and societal goals and accelerate the speed and scale of regional transformation.

These aspirations will require understanding and resolving five growing tensions and their underlying trends. The tensions — economic and social asymmetry, technological disruption, the impact of aging populations, the polarization of the global order, and the changing nature of institutional trust — are wide-ranging and interconnected.

To mitigate the challenges and achieve an aspirational vision for the region’s future, GCC countries would need to adopt a holistic and integrated transformation agenda. This agenda introduces new economic growth models that put local first. It encompasses a human-centric approach to well-being that puts citizens first. Moreover, it seeks to bolster institutional agility and accountability to put innovation first. Download and read the report here.