Podcast: El Gamal on going beyond trends, transactions, performance and promotion

Campaign ME

02-05-2025

On the latest episode of Campaign Middle East's On The Record podcast, Ahmed El Gamal, an Executive Director of Marketing with more than 15 years of experience within the brand and marketing industry, who discusses the tug of war between brand and performance; the move past transactional agency-client relationships and the uberification of services; and the importance of knowing how and when to jump on the bandwagon of trends without placing brand safety and brand consistency at risk.
El Gamal reveals that the Middle East brand and marketing industry has, indeed, been overcorrecting towards performance, taking examples of brands such as Airbnb that have great success stories by doing the opposite – focusing on brand.
'Brand and performance doesn't have to be a tug of war,' El Gamal says, 'It's not about brand versus performance. It's about brand and performance. Ultimately, if you treat them as separate, and have separate teams for them with different KPIs – that's where the problems arise. The role of brand is to create demand and desirability, which is so much more than awareness. Brand is demand, which helps you raise your pricing power. So, if you're able to create value through brand initiatives or demand initiatives, then performance supplements it.'
El Gamal adds, 'Performance is like sugar, and brand is like nutrition. We need both. But if these teams are cycling in different directions and they're not speaking to one another, then you have a tug of war-type situation and this is where the problem arises.'
The conversation also delves into the ongoing debate about agency-client relationships, which have, reportedly, become transactional in a world where we preach the buzzwords of relationships, relevance, empathy and positive experiences.
Without mincing words, El Gamal calls for immediate change, saying, 'If you have a transaction with an agency, expect a service. If you treat them like a partner, you get great work, you get credibility, creativity and trust. This is a two-way street. Brands shouldn't treat agencies as vendors. Clients and agencies both have a responsibility to get to know each other a lot better. While their are campaign KPIs, it's also important to make the effort to understand the bigger picture.'
El Gamal adds, 'Agencies tend to live in the fourth P of marketing – promotion. And if you live there not knowing the nuances of the business, the reasoning and strategy behind the other three Ps of pricing, place and product, and if you don't know the client's KPIs and if the client doesn't provide clarity on the agency's KPIs, then the model doesn't work. Sometimes during the RFP process, there's a chemistry meeting, but even this needs to go deeper for brand and to build meaningful relationships.'
He then shares his take on when marketers to say 'No' to tempting trends and brands such as Duolingo that are perfecting the balance between leading on trends while staying on-brand. El Gamal also opens up about the pain points within the procurement and pitching process, from the lack of detailed briefs to the lack of clear evaluation criteria and clear feedback loops.
Before he concludes the conversation, El Gamal shares a key message, 'A lot of the focus among marketers has been scaling and speed. If we take a second to pause and reflect, we'll realise that the brands and marketers that win aren't those that focus on scale and speed, but those who choose to focus on trust and credibility – whether that's internally or externally. If brands don't focus on building trust and credibility with their respective audiences, they will begin to struggle really soon.'
For more such insights from a very intriguing conversation, watch the full video above.