Peak-season retail performance increasingly depends on speed to relevance: the ability to turn changes in demand, offers and creative performance into locally relevant, coordinated action before the opportunity fades.

In MENA, where campaigns must flex across markets, languages, dialects and a sequence of major trading moments, creative capacity is no longer simply a production function. It is a core performance capability.

At a recent Smartly and Snapchat roundtable in Dubai, we had candid conversations with senior retail, agency and platform leaders about where peak-season performance is getting harder—and where organisations still get stuck.

One hypothesis I wanted to test with the room was this:

Retailers do not necessarily have a strategy problem. They have a speed problem.

The discussion reinforced that idea, but also sharpened it. The challenge is not producing more assets for the sake of volume. It is creating enough localised variation, dialect alignment and cultural relevance to respond to shifting consumer behaviour without adding operational friction.

Leaders repeatedly returned to how quickly creative fatigue can set in, particularly during peak periods such as Ramadan. Assets need to refresh continuously, and the feedback loop between performance data, creative insight and live execution needs to become much tighter.

Most teams know which products they want to promote, which audiences they want to reach and which commercial moments matter most. The harder question is what happens next.

When performance changes, how quickly can media, creative and commercial teams turn that learning into something a customer actually sees?

Hours? Days? Weeks?

During peak season, that gap can be the difference between seeing an opportunity and capturing it.

Peak season is a journey, not a moment

Across MENA, the same marketing system must flex for Saudi National Day, White Friday, Dubai Shopping Festival, Ramadan and Eid—each with different customer behaviours, cultural contexts and commercial priorities.

Research from Google and Visa found that November ecommerce sales in the UAE and Saudi Arabia rise 44% above the monthly average. During Black Friday week, spending rises 31% in the UAE and 36% in Saudi Arabia compared with non-peak periods.

But peak season in MENA is not simply one unusually busy week. It is a sequence of major trading moments, with demand building, shifting and resurfacing throughout the retail calendar.

That creates four pressures for marketers:

• Demand moves.
• Creative fatigues.
• Basket pressure increases.
• Customers move between digital and physical environments.

These were not abstract pressures. The discussion repeatedly returned to the need to refresh assets before fatigue sets in, respond to changing consumer behaviour and adapt creative by market, language and cultural context while the commercial moment is still active.

So yes, planning matters. But the fastest teams are not improvising their way through peak season. They have already established the signals, templates, guardrails and decision rights that let them respond without rebuilding the campaign.

That is why the best marketing decisions increasingly begin before launch. Teams need to plan with greater confidence, while also building enough adaptability into the plan to respond once the market starts moving.

Peak performance is a coordination problem

Marketing teams have become incredibly sophisticated at optimising individual parts of the operation:

• Media teams optimise media.
• Creative teams optimise creative.
• Commercial teams optimise products, promotions and offers.

But customers experience all of those decisions at once.

Imagine a product beginning to outperform in Saudi Arabia. The media team sees the signal, but the opportunity still depends on several other things happening:

The investment needs to move. The Arabic creative may need to be refreshed. The offer and commercial message need to remain accurate. The updated campaign needs to be approved and activated while the spike is still happening.

If media identifies the opportunity in an hour but the creative response still takes two weeks to reach the market, what exactly have we optimised?

If creative changes instantly but investment cannot move behind it, we have the same problem.

Peak performance is increasingly a coordination problem. Budget needs to move with demand. Creative needs to stay relevant. Offers need to reflect the commercial opportunity.

And all three need to move together.

This is also why fluidity cannot be limited to creative production. Retailers need the ability to move budget as performance changes, directing investment towards the channels, campaigns and audiences where it can have the greatest impact.

Creative capacity is now a performance capability

One number from the workshop captures the scale of the challenge:

330 billion creative assets are generated through Smartly every year.

That is creative at a scale no traditional production model was built for.

The lesson is not that the world needs 330 billion more ads. Please, no.

It is that creative capacity can no longer be measured only by how many assets a team produces. It is the ability to adapt, refresh, update and localise relevant creative at the pace the market demands—without adding an equivalent amount of production work.

One seasonal idea may need to work across GCC markets, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE; in Arabic and English; with market-specific dialect and cultural nuance; and across different products, offers, audiences, formats, channels and placements.

If every variation requires another manual brief, another production request and another approval chain, teams will quickly run out of hours in the day.

Instead of treating each asset as a separate production job, marketers need to turn one campaign into a modular creative system. The core brand direction stays consistent. The creative variables change.

That is where dynamic creative optimisation and automation should earn their place.

Not by replacing the creative idea or removing the marketer’s judgement. By removing the repetitive production work around the idea.

Teams approve the templates, logic and guardrails. Technology helps adapt and activate the work at the necessary scale. People retain control of strategy, brand standards, cultural context and commercial decisions.

The result is not simply more creative. It is more relevant creative, delivered faster and without an equivalent increase in production complexity.

The ambition is to make creative a real-time growth engine. That means establishing tighter feedback loops between retail media performance data and agile asset iteration, so teams can see what is working and refresh, localise or adapt the creative before relevance fades.

Performance insight should inform the next creative decision. That creative response should generate the next set of performance signals. The faster that loop operates, the more useful both creative and measurement become.

We can already see that principle at work in the region. Using Smartly’s feed-based automation across eight markets and multiple languages, Talabat reduced creative setup time by 90% while lowering its Google Ads CPA by 15%. The team could spend less time on repetitive operations and more time on performance insights, strategy and messaging. Read the Talabat case study.

That is a far more useful conversation about AI than simply asking whether AI can make an ad.

Customers do not experience “online” and “offline” retail

Production speed is only one part of the problem. Relevance also has to follow customers across digital discovery and physical retail.

We still talk about online and offline conversion as though customers experience them as two separate journeys. They do not.

Someone may discover a product on their phone, share it with a friend, research the brand, check the nearest location, walk into a store, and buy it.

The customer experiences one journey, regardless of how the marketing organisation categorises the conversion.

That’s what makes developments such as Snapchat’s Promoted Places interesting. More than 75 million people use Snap Map each month across the Middle East, creating a large discovery environment centred on real-world people and places.

Promoted Places gives retailers a way to give physical locations greater visibility within that experience, helping connect digital discovery with a possible store visit. Snap has also found that marking locations as “Top Picks” produced a typical 17.6% visitation lift among frequent users compared with showing a place without that annotation. 

That matters in MENA, where the path to purchase varies significantly by category and physical retail remains particularly important for experiences such as luxury shopping.

Digital isn’t replacing stores. It’s changing what brings someone through the door.

For retailers, this adds another layer to the coordination challenge. It’s not enough to have the right creative or the right media plan in isolation. Teams need to understand where demand is developing, how customers are moving between touchpoints, and where they ultimately choose to convert.

The metric we may be missing: speed to relevance

This was the biggest idea I took away from our discussions.

We measure impressions, click-through rates, CPA, ROAS, reach and incrementality. All of those metrics matter.

But how many organisations can tell you how long it takes to turn a meaningful commercial signal into coordinated customer-facing action?

That is what I mean by speed to relevance.

Speed to relevance is the elapsed time between detecting a commercial signal and putting an appropriate, coordinated response in front of the customer.

At its simplest:

Speed to relevance = signal-to-decision time + decision-to-live time

The first part measures how quickly an organisation understands a signal and decides what to do about it. The second measures how quickly that decision becomes a live change to investment, creative, messaging or activation.

A dashboard might reveal that a product is accelerating, an audience is saturating or a channel is delivering more efficient growth. But the dashboard itself creates no value unless the organisation can respond while the signal is still commercially relevant.

This is why measurement needs to become decisioning. Its value doesn’t come only from explaining what happened. It comes from guiding better budget, channel and creative decisions while there is still time to influence the outcome.

Speed shouldn’t mean reacting to every minor fluctuation. That would create more chaos, not less.

A strong operating system distinguishes meaningful signals from noise. It uses agreed thresholds, brand controls and commercial guardrails to determine which changes require action, and who has the authority to make them.

How to shorten the distance between insight and action

For retail teams preparing for the next major trading moment, I would start with three practical questions.

1. Where does time disappear?

Take the last meaningful signal your team received: a demand spike, an inventory change, a fatigued asset, or a new commercial offer.

How long did it take to:

• Recognise the change?
• Decide on a response?
• Secure approval?
• Adapt the creative or media plan?
• Put that response live?

The longest gap is probably the part of the operating model that needs the most attention.

2. What can be approved before the pressure begins?

Teams shouldn’t debate every product swap, language change, or budget adjustment from first principles during peak week.

Determine in advance which elements can change, under which conditions and within which boundaries. That could include approved templates, localised copy frameworks, offer rules, inventory signals, budget thresholds and escalation paths.

The goal isn’t to automate judgement. It’s to stop forcing people to repeat decisions that have already been made.

3. Who can act when the signal appears?

A technically fast workflow can still move slowly when decision rights are unclear.

Retailers need to know who can move investment, who can approve creative changes, and who can update the commercial message when an agreed threshold is reached.

Speed comes from the combination of technology, process and authority. Improving only one will not solve the whole problem.

Knowing sooner only matters when you can respond in time

At Smartly, we connect creative production, media activation, and intelligence, helping teams turn performance and commercial signals into coordinated changes with fewer manual handoffs.

Automation can handle repetitive adaptation and activation. Marketers retain control of strategy, brand standards, and market judgement. That gives teams more time for the work they were actually hired to do: understand customers, create strong ideas, and make good commercial decisions.

As retail leaders head back to their teams, there’s one question worth asking:

What is the one thing we can change before the next peak that will make the biggest difference?

The answer may be creative production. It may be budget flexibility, approval processes, local market coordination or the connection between measurement and execution.

For most organisations, it is probably an uncomfortable combination of several.

The next major retail moment may not be won by the brand with the largest budget. It may be won by the organisation that can see what is changing, make the decision and act while the opportunity is still there.

That is speed to relevance, and knowing sooner only matters when you can respond in time.