LONDON: When Omnicom Advertising and Google launched what they describe as the first artificial intelligence-powered creative intelligence system in the Middle East this April, the promise was unusual: that a machine could tell a creative director not just what was weak in an ad, but what it would take to make it more effective, more memorable and more likely to convert.
The project combines Google’s ABCD framework with Omnicom’s proprietary creative AI to pressure-test advertising before it runs. Built exclusively to assess YouTube ads, it is being positioned as a new way to evaluate and improve creative work.
Built exclusively to assess the effectiveness of YouTube advertisements, the project has been positioned as a transformative new tool in how creative work gets evaluated and improved.
“We’re in a place where the clients are continuously being asked by their organizations on how they’re spending their money,” Noah Khan, chief innovation officer at Omnicom Advertising for the regions of Central and Eastern Europe and Africa and the Middle East, told Arab News. “Any data points we can give them (…) just make it a lot easier for them to sell an idea internally or get funding to see (it) through.”
Ultimately, Khan said, the system helps creatives move from “I think” to “I know.”
The project began in August 2024 as a conversation between two “trusted partners,” driven by a shared belief that the industry needed to move from measuring effectiveness after launch to predicting and improving it at the source of the idea.
“But to pull that off, it requires the right industry trusted partnerships and ecosystem relationships,” said Aishi Lahiri, director of advertising solutions at Google Middle East and North Africa, who helped devise and bring the project to life.
While developing the technology proved relatively straightforward, “finding the true role of tech in the human workflow” was the project’s greatest hurdle, Lahiri told Arab News.
“Our vision for this initiative was always to empower creative talent by grounding their process in performance science,” he said, adding that the approach reflects how Google views its own role in the wider ecosystem.
“We are the foundational enablers. We provide the structural science and the AI engine for YouTube, and the agencies build their proprietary creative magic on top of it.”
Aishi Lahiri, director of advertising solutions at Google Middle East and North Africa. (Supplied)
The system consists of three distinct layers, built on Google’s ABCD, a well-validated performance model for YouTube ads made publicly available in 2020. The first layer uses the ABCD framework, which scores video ads across four benchmarks: attention, branding, connection, and direction. The second is Omnicom’s proprietary Brave Bot, which challenges creative work on distinctiveness, cultural relevance, and convention-breaking potential. A third layer adds regional cultural intelligence specific to the Africa, Middle East and Turkiye market.
“What the creatives are getting is almost a co-pilot that is sort of ideating with them in real time,” said Khan, noting that teams can choose to engage one or all three layers depending on their needs.
The process is simple: Creatives upload a PDF storyboard or an early, unedited cut of a video, and the system reviews it, returning specific, actionable feedback on how to improve performance.
At the heart of the system is Brave Bot, named in tribute to Lee Clow, the advertising legend behind Apple’s iconic 1984 campaign and Omnicom’s TBWA former chairman and chief creative officer, who in 2018 wrote a manifesto titled “Do the Brave Thing” — serving as both a celebration of the agency’s legacy and a parting piece of wisdom.
As well as equipping creatives with data to validate an idea, Brave Bot represents a long-held ambition to embed AI more meaningfully across the agency.
“The BraveBot is trained on some of the best creative work that we’ve done over decades,” said Khan, and, in a deliberate design choice, it responds in a tone not unlike British Chef Gordon Ramsay. “It’s very pointed, very tongue-in-cheek. But it’s also meant to add a level of humor and levity, so that interacting with it doesn’t feel like you’re speaking to a machine.”
The Middle East, home to more than 200 million YouTube users daily across nearly 200 nationalities and an even greater range of languages and cultural contexts, made for an ideal testing ground.
“You couldn’t get that level of audience segmentation, that level of audience depth, anywhere else,” said Khan.
For Google, launching here was less a strategic choice than a natural consequence. “The project was actually born right here in the region rather than the region being chosen for it,” said Lahiri. “The appetite for pioneering new territory is what made this the only place a project like this could emerge.”
The Middle East has, in recent years, become an increasingly fertile ground for advertising technology.
The region has also become ideal for ad-tech experimentation. During the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, Coca-Cola Arabia and EssenceMediacom used Google’s AI-powered Ads Creative Studio to generate more than 30 personalized video ads in Saudi Arabia, with reported gains in view-through rate, cost-per-view, market share and sales volume. In late 2024 and early 2025, Snap and Omnicom Media Group MENA ran attention studies in Saudi Arabia that found Snapchat augmented reality formats delivered significantly higher attention than standard social benchmarks.
Asked whether the system will change what Google expects from advertising on YouTube, Lahiri said the technology is meant to give creative professionals more room to take risks, not fewer.
“This initiative is less about raising it and more about nailing the structural foundations much easier,” he said. “When the baseline science of attention and branding is taken care of, we give creative professionals a lot more room to actually raise the bar themselves.”
For audiences, he added, that should mean a better viewing experience: “more helpful, relevant and engaging ads that actually resonate.”
Noah Khan, chief innovation officer at Omnicom Advertising for the regions of Central and Eastern Europe and Africa and the Middle East. (Supplied)
As of 2025, YouTube is one of Saudi Arabia’s most widely used platforms, with around 27.5 million users — nearly 80 percent of the population — placing it among the world’s highest-penetration markets. Alongside WhatsApp, Snapchat and TikTok, it is a cornerstone of the region’s digital landscape.
For marketers, YouTube’s appeal lies in its massive reach, search-driven discovery and strong performance on brand and sales metrics, often delivering return on investment that outperforms TV and many other digital channels.
With AI reshaping both content creation and performance analysis, the race for attention is likely to intensify. For marketers, the question is increasingly not just who reaches audiences, but who controls the tools that shape what gets made and how it is optimized.
“Our approach is simply ensuring AI remains a tool for creative empowerment rather than automation,” said Lahiri, who dismissed concerns about undue influence. “By promoting a ‘human-in-the-loop’ approach, the AI manages the mechanical tasks and identifies technical gaps, giving more space to human intuition and lived experience that will always be the heart of impactful advertising.”
Khan, too, is clear about where the balance should lie. “The way I see the use of AI and how I think it’s going to be benefiting us is to very much work as a creative partner, not a creative replacement,” he said, describing Omnicom’s tools as “supplementary elements” that augment and accelerate creative thinking at scale.
“For me, the view of the future is that AI is very much going to be an incredible tool. It’s going to allow us to focus on what really matters and what is really valuable rather than replace what that is.”
He pointed to Apple’s 2025 Christmas advertisement — produced entirely by hand, with puppets and puppeteers, at a moment when AI-generated content was proliferating — as evidence that exceptional work will always find its audience. “Great work will stand up and stand out for itself.”
Looking a decade ahead, Khan sees the pendulum swinging back toward the human. “I think there will be greater value for human-made creative output than ever before.”
In the end, he argued, how AI is deployed will come down to the DNA of each brand — and the conviction of the people behind it.
“At the core of it, it is about fantastic creative ideas. And that, I think, is what (will always) stand out.”
