Trevor d'Souza, who leads media investments across Radix MENA, joins Built for MENA, the podcast on what it actually takes to build, sell and scale AdTech and MarTech in the region.Trevor describes his seat plainly: he's responsible for where clients' money goes "and if it's working or not," across the full mix, not a platform person but "the person who tries to make sense of it all." And in this market, making sense of it starts with throwing out the standard assumption that one plan fits all. You've got 200 nationalities carrying different identities, communities and languages, with consumption shifting by day, time, platform and language. His sharpest reframe is that reach isn't the problem here. This is "the most connected market in the world," and "you can buy reach all day and impressions all day." What's harder to buy is whether the message is landing, whether you're contextually correct. As he puts it, "you cannot do one channel, one format and call it a media strategy."The only-in-MENA moments make the point better than any theory. A campaign that ran out of home with artworks in Tagalog and Arabic, Malayalam and Arabic, Hindi and Arabic, English and Arabic. "Which other market can you pick on?" Or the planning puzzle of a professional in their 30s consuming three radio stations a day across five platforms, on Instagram but not active. Even Mother's Day arrives three or four times a year here, celebrated on different dates by different communities. Trevor's own morning delivered the best evidence for his argument that outsiders "underestimate the value of offline": his car broke down, he took the metro to the interview, and was struck by how many people around him were listening to the radio on headphones. Premium out of home "carries enormous weight," and his warning on the funnel is blunt: if you don't fill it at the top, it's never going to come down.Asked what he'd build from scratch, Trevor doesn't hesitate: one platform that gives a genuine full-funnel picture across offline and online, plus a cleaner way to evaluate media quality rather than just quantify it. "We burn impressions, but are we getting engagement?" And his five-year view is the boldest claim of the episode: if this region cracks the code, it could be the only market with a real framework for reaching a multicultural audience, one every diversifying city from London to Portugal will eventually need. "We have our own playbook." He tells the story of asking a US planner how to reach specific Indian communities in specific American cities, and the answer came down to Meta and Google. In the UAE, "we know where they stay." His discipline for getting there is the one he's set his whole team for 2026: keep asking why. "Ask 100 whys if you need to." Go sit in the client's office, be part of the business, understand the whys.Full episode and every previous conversation at builtformena.com.Quick-fire: • MENA advertising in one word? Underpriced • Most overrated buzzword in AdTech? Personalization • Most underrated opportunity in MENA AdTech? Integration •
