After more than two decades living and working in Dubai, Tariq Häkkinen has a rare, long-term perspective on how the Middle East’s media and technology landscape has evolved. A serial tech founder and former agency executive, Häkkinen has worked across Europe and the Middle East, spanning mobile, adtech, health tech and telecoms.
Today he is a co-founder of Catch, a company aiming to make out of home advertising interactive, measurable and transactional by bridging physical media with mobile engagement. In conversation with New Digital Age, he discusses the MENA out of home ecosystem, why Dubai is uniquely positioned to embrace innovation, and how Catch is trying to unlock performance metrics that advertisers have long demanded.
You have been based in Dubai for a long time. From an out of home perspective, what makes the MENA market, and Dubai in particular, so distinctive?
Dubai is unusual because out of home is not just about roadsides. A lot of the highest value exposure actually happens indoors because of the climate, particularly in malls, residential towers and commercial buildings.
You still have the huge premium roadside digital screens, especially on the routes from the airport to areas like Downtown, the Marina, the Palm and Emirates Hills, which are dominated by luxury brands and high-end awareness campaigns. That segment will always exist, but indoors is where you see a very different dynamic, more retail-driven, more transactional and much more localised.
How does that shape the type of advertising that works in the region?
There are effectively three tiers of audiences. At the top end you have high net worth individuals who are harder to convert directly, but where large format premium out of home plays a big role in brand building.
Then there is a mid-tier audience, people living comfortably in the city but not necessarily shopping luxury all the time. Finally there is a very localised layer, everyday services like food delivery, gyms, cleaning services and convenience brands, often delivered through indoor networks in residential and commercial buildings. Dubai supports all three, which makes it a fascinating test bed.
What about the wider industry ecosystem in MENA, how does it compare with Europe?
In adtech terms it is not radically different, but Dubai has a unique ability to move quickly. If there is alignment at an executive or regulatory level, change can happen very fast.
You do not have the same layers of bureaucracy you might find elsewhere. Recently the city introduced a regulator, MADA, to oversee out of home across Dubai. The goal is to protect the look and feel of the city, but also to create a more coherent ecosystem for media owners and advertisers to grow together. That kind of coordinated approach is very powerful.
How important are relationships in making progress in the region?
They are critical. Dubai is extremely relationship-based. People are open to new ideas and innovation, but trust takes time. You cannot really succeed by flying in and out.
You need to be present, to understand how decisions are made and to build credibility over time. Once that trust is there, things can move very quickly.
Turning to the company, what problem were you trying to solve when you founded Catch?
We started by looking at out of home as a channel that had not really grown beyond being an awareness medium. For years the industry conversation has been about how to take it from five or six percent of spend to something closer to ten percent, and how to make it behave more like online.
Programmatic helped with buying, but it did not solve the fundamental limitation, which is finite inventory. So we looked at how to unlock value through interaction, engagement and transactions.
How does the technology work in practice?
The simplest way to think about it is Pokémon Go for advertising. If our SDK is embedded in an app on your phone and you are in front of a screen, we can enable you to interact with that content, engage with it and even transact.
Outdoors we use geofencing and polygons, and indoors we use a device designed for retail and mall environments. In retail, in particular, this works extremely well because it is a closed loop.
Why is retail such a strong use case?
Retail already has the data and the ecosystem. Using something like a loyalty app, you can add value at the start of the shopping journey, not just at the checkout.
You can personalise offers based on transaction history and measure outcomes properly. That is much harder to do in out of home, where you have many media owners and fragmented inventory.
Performance measurement is a recurring theme. What do advertisers really want to see?
They want out of home to operate like online. They want to understand impressions, engagements and conversions, not probabilistic models with wide margins of error.
We have built audience measurement using low energy Bluetooth to validate exposure, but the real value is interaction and conversion. Once we have a few large-scale case studies, that chicken-and-egg problem becomes much easier to solve.
Finally, what advice would you give to someone in the UK or Europe looking at Dubai as an opportunity?
If you have a genuinely valuable proposition and you understand the market, Dubai is an excellent place to build. Do your research, speak to people before you arrive and be prepared to invest time in relationships.
It is easy to operate from, highly supportive of innovation and, from a lifestyle perspective, very hard to beat.
