Saudi agencies’ longstanding concern over hiring enough nationals to produce ads that connect with locals is now coupled with increasing concern over inflation. While the problem of rising rents isn’t as bad as in the UAE, agencies are having difficulty keeping up. With margins under pressure from clients, Saudi agencies are struggling to offer competitive salaries. It doesn’t help that the government’s Saudization efforts have virtually brought a halt to further importation of foreign talent.
 
“The system itself doesn’t generate advertising talent,” says Antonio Boulos, managing director of Albert Promoseven in Riyadh. “There are some good ones, but other industries are paying much more than we can afford. … Ad agencies are in a cutthroat business at the moment, and we have been for quite some time. It’s affecting everybody’s budget.”
 
“To recruit Saudi talent is almost impossible here,” says Tarek Istambouli, managing director of In Communications, a Saudi-owned agency. “There are 10 or 15 Saudi professionals in advertising agencies, and they tend to rotate from one agency to another.”
 
The problem is not just limited to creatives, says Boulos. “The industry is becoming less attractive to fresh graduates – even on the client management side.” Graduates are instead lured by more lucrative pay within multinationals such as banks and telecoms.
 
Lifestyle issues – that is, Saudi Arabia’s notorious lack of things to do outside of work – are one of the factors hampering recruitment, but it’s not the only one. In fact, the main obstacle is the government’s virtual ban on recruitment from outside the kingdom, says Boulos.
 
“Literally, you can’t recruit now from outside. There isn’t a way around it unless you fulfill a certain quota [of Saudis].” Worse, he says, you rarely get a clear answer from authorities on what the required percentage is.
 
The only solution, says Boulos, is to recruit locally, and for agencies to do that, they need to raise their margins enough to offer talented Saudis competitive salaries. This in turn requires doing a better job of proving their worth to clients. “Agencies need to take their case to their main source of revenue, which is their clients, and say: If you want efficient services, if you want good support and good consultancy coming from your agencies, you should be able to pay what it takes to get good people on board.”