One recent afternoon in Dubai, Anthony Permal received notification that a social media influencer he follows on Instagram was broadcasting on the company’s new Live Stories platform.
Permal, the head of digital marketing at an international pharmaceutical company, opened his smartphone and tuned in. The influencer has a six-figure following and attracts an average of 3,000-4,000 likes per static image, yet their live stream was being viewed by no more than 10 people.
“It made me think,” Permal told Arab News. “Where is the audience? Just how much influence does this person have?”
With influencers demanding anything from $130 up to $50,000 per post, there is a growing cynicism from companies regarding return on investment. Yet the recent roll-out of Instagram’s new Live platform across the Middle East has inadvertently handed local PR companies a key tool for better understanding the level of clout that influencers’ accounts have.
As Tony Lewis, founder of Dubai-based PR agency Total Communications argues: “It requires a far greater level of commitment to tune into a live video and intelligently engage than it does to double-tap a photo.”
“We are living in this age of digital hypnotism,” added Lewis. “Everyone has a smartphone and they are connected to it 24 hours a day, but how much attention do they actually give to what they are liking on Instagram or Facebook? Is it genuine? Does seeing someone’s product post really impact your own decisions?”
A study by BPG Cohn & Wolfe would suggest it does. A survey of 1,008 United Arab Emirates (UAE) residents found that 63 percent of people feel their purchasing decisions are directly impacted by influencers, while 71 percent will be more interested in buying a brand if it is endorsed by someone they follow on social media.
According to influencers.ae, there are approximately 1,385 influencers across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) who are followed by a combined 549 million users. The majority operate in niche markets, such as food, fashion, travel and automotive. The most-followed account in the region is Huda Kattan, a Dubai-based beauty blogger who posts from @HudaBeauty to 17.3 million followers and has launched her own make-up range internationally. Harrods, among others, stocks her supplies.
Yet for every Kattan there are a variety of impersonators and imposters, resulting in a sea of skepticism regarding whether the five- and six-figure follower bases of some influencer accounts are real users or paid-for bots.
“We know that a lot of influencers do buy followers and are fake,” said Taghreed Oraibi, who led the BPG Cohn & Wolfe study. “But we are finding Instagram Live very useful for separating the real from the fake. If you have a few hundred-thousand followers and only a handful of people watch your live broadcast, then that is a very big sign.”
Without regulation, the fees demanded from brands for endorsement deals vary wildly across the region, some industry executives say. Influencers in the UAE and Kuwait command far greater sums than their Omani or Jordanian counterparts, who often ask only to be invited to the next event.
Permal, who will speak about social media transparency at next week’s inaugural Influencer Marketing Summit in Dubai, said most brands pay between $130-$250 for a post or two, but has heard stories of influencers charging upward of $27,000.
One of Lewis’ clients paid an influencer $31,000 to promote an event, but with no evidence that any of her million-plus followers attended, the client was left feeling it was a waste of money.
“Proper measurement is needed to justify the spend,” Lewis said. “Ultimately, it is all about return on investment and we as an industry need to do a lot more research and thinking before pouring money over people just because they have a lot of ‘followers’.”
Since the launch of Instagram Stories last year, there are more than 150 million people using the platform every day, with the Live function operating as an extension. The Twitter equivalent, Periscope, has been available in the region since 2015, while Snapchat opened its first Middle East office in Dubai earlier this month. The prolificacy of smartphones should bode well for such developments, but whether live-video applications can help uncover hyped-up influencers remains a challenge.
“People will always find a way,” said Permal, adding it is the responsibility of brands and PR companies to utilize tools such as Followerwonk or BuzzSumo.com to carry out audit checks on influencers before engaging.
Meanwhile, the dark side of the industry is already adapting. Fake Instagram Live viewers are now available for purchase online, with the top result in a Google search, coolsouk.com, promising 20,000 live video views for $120. Registered to a UAE mobile phone, the company said all six of its packages were currently out of stock.
Why Instagram Live spells the death of phony Gulf ‘influencers’
Why Instagram Live spells the death of phony Gulf ‘influencers’
Transparency is key to trust, says CNNIC exec
- Cathy Ibal outlines CNN’s multi-platform strategy and approach to AI amid shifting audience habits
DUBAI: Overall trust in news has stayed stable for the third year in a row at 40 percent, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2025.
Yet the news industry is growing more fragmented as engagement with traditional media sources such as TV and print declines and audiences turn to social media and video platforms for news, the same report found.
In this environment, Arab News spoke to Cathy Ibal, senior vice-president of CNN International Commercial, about the evolving nature of the news, particularly broadcast, industry.
CNN recognizes the shift in “the way that people access, consume and engage with news media,” and has adapted as a network to be present across various channels including TV, digital, mobile, and social media, among others, she said.
While CNN is synonymous with “breaking news,” “which is when we have our largest audience spikes and interest,” she said that it is part of the network’s mission “to be essential to people every day” through content across varied topics including business, technology, and health.
In the Middle East region, CNN audiences are 1.5 times more likely than the global average to engage with the network via social media and mobile apps, according to research by Differentology.
They are also 1.5 times more likely to rely on user-generated content as a primary news source compared with the global average.
CNN is “acutely aware of the dynamic nature of content consumption in the Middle East,” where a significant proportion of the population is under the age of 30, resulting in “an accelerated take-up of new technology, and therefore ways of consuming news media,” Ibal said.
“To that end, we have a considerable content offering for and about the region,” she added, referring to shows such as “Connect the World” with Becky Anderson and “CNN Creators,” as well as CNN Arabic.
Despite changing audience behavior, Ibal believes there is something “uniquely powerful” about traditional TV, from both an audience and advertiser perspective. Ultimately, a multi-platform approach allows the network and advertisers to connect with more diverse audiences in different ways.
One of the key focuses of the network’s branded content studio, Create, for example, is content strategy. “The same piece of content cannot simply be created for one platform and reused on others,” Ibal said.
“We always say that powerful storytelling must be at the heart of a well-performing campaign. The role of content strategy is to determine how to best tell that story in different native environments.”
Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming more commonplace in the newsroom, with approximately 81 percent of journalists using AI tools in their work regularly, according to a 2025 global study.
Still, audiences remain skeptical about the use of AI in news. Only 12 percent of respondents are comfortable with fully AI-generated news, rising to 43 percent when a human being leads with some AI help, and 62 percent for entirely human-made news, according to the same study.
The key to earning and maintaining trust, according to Ibal, is transparency.
Commercially, CNN has used automation and machine learning for many years, specifically for audience targeting and personalization, as well as to automate time-consuming tasks in its branded studio and to analyze large data sets for audience insight and campaign evaluation.
Editorially, the network’s approach to using AI is “rooted in responsibility and transparency,” Ibal said. With major global events, such as elections, coming up, CNN is investing in areas such as AI-driven fact-checking and misinformation detection tools that identify manipulated images, deepfakes, and misleading content before it reaches audiences, she added.
Ibal said: “Any use of AI across CNN — whether for commercial, editorial or product development — must adhere to our standards and practices and strict AI guidelines to ensure our audiences and brand partners can always trust our work in this area.”
