How one agency used AI to accelerate their client’s market entry into Saudi

Roma Osokin is a performance marketing architect. As the CEO of agency OHM, he is dedicated to scaling brands globally by bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and digital maturity to drive sustainable growth.

For agencies, helping clients enter a new market used to be a gruelling game of this-or-that. We could launch quickly by sacrificing creative quality, or we could build beautiful, localised ads that cost a fortune and took months to produce.

In the traditional agency model, speed, cost, and quality were a constant trade-off. Thanks to AI, we’ve turned that previously impossible triangle into our baseline.

At tech agency OHM, we recently proved this at scale for a mobile trading platform that was launching in Saudi Arabia. Faced with a high-stakes rollout that demanded perfection, we scrapped the traditional playbook in favour of an end-to-end, AI-driven workflow.

Mastering the kingdom’s digital frontier

Success in Saudi isn’t about simply showing up. It’s about speaking the language of a digital-first market. For our client, the move into the kingdom was a calculated response to a unique economic landscape.

“Saudi Arabia is one of the most digitally sophisticated markets in the world, and the barrier to entry for financial services is high,” says Alex Katsovich, industry manager at Google. “Driven by Vision 2030 and a young, mobile-first population with 97% smartphone penetration and 71% under the age of 35, Saudi represents one of the fastest-growing digital economies in the Middle East. This made it an ideal market for their mobile trading platform to crack.”

While the brand’s vision set the stage, the actual boots-on-the-ground reality for us as their creative partners was clear: high potential demands high precision. We knew that standard market entry tactics weren’t going to cut it.

In the Saudi digital marketing landscape, trust is anchored in cultural authenticity, meaning generic, copy-paste ads are rejected by a savvy audience that demands local nuance. With our client’s goal being to increase new app registrations and reduce cost per acquisition (CPA), we needed to make an immediate impact. We used AI tools to produce high-quality, localised assets at a previously impossible speed, transforming AI from a novelty to the focus of our creative strategy.

This shift wasn’t just about what we created, but how we created it. Rather than just accelerating the production slog, we bypassed it entirely. We swapped physical sets for digital environments and eliminated the old-school grind of endless briefs, location scouting, and waiting for the right light.

From production slog to prompt engineering

Our process began long before a single frame was rendered. We leveraged Gemini Deep Research to anchor our go-to-market strategy, surfacing hyper-local Saudi nuances that a standard brief might miss. To synthesise this intelligence, we used NotebookLM for data consolidation, turning complex research streams into a unified strategic roadmap.

This wasn’t tech on autopilot. Our creative team stepped into the role of directors, using Gemini as a cultural consultant to translate our research into precise prompt engineering. An example of a primary prompt our creative team used to anchor one of the scenes was: “A photorealistic, cinematic shot of a modern Saudi man in a white thobe and ghutra, seated in a premium airplane cabin, smiling while interacting with his smartphone. Through the window, a futuristic Saudi city skyline is visible. Soft natural lighting, high detail, 8K resolution, premium corporate aesthetic.”

This visual was paired with a script designed to build trust through education and regional accessibility. In the video, a voiceover delivers the following hook: “Would you like to learn trading without risking your real money? Try our platform. We provide a demo account with $10,000 USD to practice. The platform is fully localised in Arabic and offers dedicated customer support to guide your journey.”

With the prompts refined, we transitioned to text-to-image AI tool Imagen to serve as our concept artist. By generating high-fidelity stills to lock in the visual aesthetic and mood, we maintained a level of granular detail, from architectural nuances to specific textures, that traditional stock footage could never achieve.

The real game-changer was using Google’s AI-powered video tool, Veo, to translate these strategic stills into high-fidelity, short-form ads, similar to this fictional example:

Watch the video

Link to YouTube Video

By changing up the traditional production process, we replaced generic regional tropes with authentic Saudi visual cues, effectively bridging the gap between deep-tech innovation and culturally grounded paid media.

“This AI-driven approach allowed the brand to test and approve various video iterations that felt native to Saudi, all from their office outside of the kingdom,” says Google’s Katsovich. “If a creative element didn’t land quite right, they could adjust it almost instantly. In a market as dynamic as Saudi Arabia, being able to pivot in hours rather than weeks is a massive competitive advantage.”

Redefining ROI: Speed meets savings

The results of this new approach speak for themselves. Not only did we slash a month off the production timeline, we also saved our client an estimated $180,000 USD in production costs as we no longer required expensive on-site shoots.

But we didn’t just save them time and money. We also improved the numbers on the dashboard.

The AI-generated campaign achieved a 25% higher conversion rate for new app registrations, compared to the platform’s historical market averages. At the same time, the CPA fell, coming in 25% lower than the average typically seen across the brand’s markets.

Your AI-powered market-entry opportunity

Scaling into a new market used to require months of production and massive localisation budgets. By leveraging a tech-first creative workflow, our team overcame these legacy bottlenecks, allowing for a more agile and cost-effective entry.

This new approach has changed our client’s market entry strategy entirely. By integrating AI-driven creative production, we helped them move faster, spend smarter, and connect more deeply with a local audience than conventional methods would allow. They tell us this is the new blueprint for all their localised campaigns moving forward.

This success in Saudi Arabia provides a repeatable roadmap for other brands looking to enter new markets. By turning AI-powered speed and flexibility into a competitive advantage, the rules of global expansion have been rewritten.

The new-market playbook is no longer just a concept. With AI, it’s a functional reality.