Annalect, Omnicom Media's data and analytics division, today announced a partnership with Snowflake to advance martech, AI and cross-media measurement capabilities for advertisers across the Middle East and North Africa region. The announcement, dated 14 May 2026 and issued from Dubai, positions the integration as a direct response to the challenge of fragmented marketing data systems - a problem that has grown more acute as brands operate across a widening mix of digital, broadcast and retail channels.

The initiative centres on combining Annalect's expertise in data engineering and analytics with Snowflake's native cloud infrastructure, including Cortex AI, Data Clean Rooms and Snowflake Marketplace. According to the announcement, the integration will enable joint clients to access connected, privacy-focused capabilities spanning customer data platforms, agentic intelligence and cross-media measurement.

What the integration actually covers

At a technical level, the partnership targets three distinct areas. The first is customer data unification - bringing together disparate customer records and signals into a scalable and secure environment. According to the announcement, Annalect will play a key role in designing and implementing composable data architectures on Snowflake, tailoring those architectures to individual client ecosystems while maintaining data sovereignty. That last point matters in the MENA context, where data localisation requirements vary by jurisdiction and are tightening in several markets.

The second area is cross-media measurement. The use of Snowflake's Data Clean Rooms allows different data sources - broadcaster audiences, digital impressions, retail transactions - to be matched and analysed without the underlying data being exposed to other parties. Clean room architecture operates through constraints: rules that limit what analyses can be run, what can be exported, and what can be inferred across datasets. The Federal Trade Commission has published guidance on how those constraints must be designed, implemented and monitored to meaningfully limit data usage and disclosure, a standard that has shaped how the industry has built these systems globally. PPC Land has tracked the spread of Snowflake-based clean room infrastructure across the advertising industry, including NIQ's launch of a global data clean room on the platform in October 2025 and StackAdapt's integration of Snowflake Cortex AI for first-party data activation in July 2025.

The third area is agentic marketing intelligence. According to the announcement, Snowflake's platform will power agentic AI workflows across planning, optimisation and performance. The term "agentic" refers to AI systems that can execute multi-step tasks with some degree of autonomy, rather than simply responding to a single prompt. The advertising industry has moved rapidly toward this architecture in 2025 and 2026. A Snowflake research report published in March 2026 found that 42% of advertising and media firms were already running agentic AI in production - the highest rate of any industry surveyed - and that those firms reported a 69% return on generative AI investment, again the highest of any sector in the study.

The role of Snowflake Cortex AI

Snowflake Cortex AI is the artificial intelligence service integrated within Snowflake's data platform. It enables organisations to interact with data through natural language queries, run predictive models, and automate analytical workflows without requiring data to leave the Snowflake environment. For marketing teams, this is operationally significant: campaigns can be analysed, audiences segmented, and performance modelled inside the same secure environment where the underlying data sits. The elimination of data transfer requirements addresses both security risk and the latency that typically accompanies moving large datasets between systems.

Newton Research demonstrated one such implementation in November 2025, launching agentic AI analytics agents within Snowflake Cortex AI that allowed brands and agencies to run media mix modelling and incrementality analysis directly inside their Snowflake environment, without external data transfers. Horizon Media adopted that integration for its Blu Platform. The Annalect partnership operates on the same underlying principle - compute runs where the data lives - but applies it at holding company scale across the MENA region.

Snowflake's footprint across advertising holding companies

The Annalect announcement extends Snowflake's penetration into the major global advertising holding companies. In June 2025, Snowflake and Acxiom - now part of the enlarged Omnicom group following the completion of Omnicom's $13.5 billion acquisition of Interpublic on November 26, 2025 - announced plans to build joint AI marketing infrastructure, including a joint incubation hub and early access to Snowflake's product development pipeline. The Annalect-Snowflake MENA initiative arrives six months after that announcement, suggesting a pattern of Omnicom entities deepening Snowflake relationships on a region-by-region or division-by-division basis rather than through a single global deal.

The distinction between the Acxiom and Annalect arrangements matters. Acxiom's partnership with Snowflake was oriented around identity resolution and the integration of IPG's marketing tools within brand-owned cloud environments. The Annalect MENA initiative is oriented more explicitly toward operational delivery - composable data architecture, agentic workflows and cross-media measurement for clients in a specific geography. The emphasis on regional implementation reflects both the practical complexity of MENA as a market and Annalect's stated operational role as the division responsible for designing and deploying the technology stack.

What executives said

Ahmed Salem, Partnerships Director for the Middle East, North Africa and Turkey at Snowflake, addressed the practical challenge brands face when they have access to platform technology but lack the expertise to operationalise it. According to the announcement, he said: "Technology is only as powerful as the business expertise behind its implementation. By combining Snowflake's AI Data Cloud with Annalect's deep domain knowledge, we are giving brands in the region a proven blueprint to move beyond the 'where to start' phase and begin delivering immediate, measurable impact."

Dr. Hoda Daou, Managing Director at Annalect MENA, described the problem from a client perspective. According to the announcement, she said: "Today's marketers need more than standalone tools. They need connected systems that help them drive efficiency across data, media and measurement together." She continued: "Coupling Annalect's solution with Snowflake's platform brings these capabilities together in a more unified way, helping clients build stronger data foundations, more intelligent measurement frameworks, and greater efficiency and effectiveness across the marketing lifecycle. Ultimately, this is about bringing technology and marketing teams closer together to drive stronger business outcomes."

The language from both executives returns repeatedly to the gap between having technology and being able to use it. That framing is deliberate. Advertisers across MENA - as elsewhere - have accumulated data infrastructure through a combination of vendor contracts, platform integrations and internal builds. The result is rarely a coherent system. Data sits in separate environments: CRM data in one place, media delivery data in another, point-of-sale or e-commerce data somewhere else entirely. The proposition from Annalect and Snowflake is that a composable architecture on a shared cloud platform can close those gaps without requiring brands to discard existing investments.

The MENA context

The MENA region presents a specific combination of conditions that makes data infrastructure a pressing issue. Digital advertising spend across the region has grown steadily, driven by high smartphone penetration, a young demographic profile and rapid expansion in e-commerce across Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. At the same time, the media landscape remains fragmented across languages, regulatory frameworks and platform preferences. Cross-border campaign measurement is correspondingly difficult.

Data sovereignty requirements add another layer of complexity. Several MENA jurisdictions have enacted or are developing data protection frameworks that restrict the transfer of personal data outside national borders. A cloud-native architecture that keeps data within a controlled environment - and uses clean room technology for cross-party analysis rather than data sharing - addresses that compliance requirement directly, alongside the measurement objective.

Annalect is headquartered in New York and has more than 5,000 data professionals globally, according to the announcement. The MENA operation, led by Dr. Daou, is based at Dubai Media City in the United Arab Emirates. Omnicom Media has a significant presence across the region through its portfolio of agencies.

Why this matters for the marketing community

For media buyers and marketing technology practitioners, the Annalect-Snowflake announcement is most usefully read alongside the broader pattern of infrastructure consolidation underway across the major holding companies. Omnicom completed its acquisition of Interpublic on November 26, 2025, creating the world's largest advertising network by revenues with a combined pro forma revenue exceeding $25 billion. That combination brought together Omnicom's strength in MENA with IPG's presence in other regions, and merged Annalect with Acxiom - IPG's data and identity division. PPC Land covered the original merger announcement in December 2024 and the FTC's finalisation of its consent order in September 2025.

The data strategy that Annalect is now deploying in MENA - composable architecture, clean rooms, agentic AI - reflects the same logic that drove the Acxiom-Snowflake announcement in June 2025. Both initiatives use Snowflake as a common infrastructure layer, which has a practical implication for clients: data environments built to Snowflake standards should, in principle, be interoperable across Omnicom divisions. Whether that interoperability materialises at the client level, or remains within the holding company's internal systems, will determine how much of the announced capability reaches individual marketing teams.

The IAB Tech Lab's PAIR 1.1 protocol, released in July 2025, established technical standards for encrypted data matching across clean rooms, reducing implementation inconsistency across the industry. The Annalect-Snowflake architecture sits within that broader standardisation effort - using Snowflake's Data Clean Rooms as the secure matching environment and Cortex AI as the analytical layer on top.

For brands operating in MENA, the more immediate question is implementation sequencing. According to the announcement, the initiative targets four outcomes: unifying and activating customer data in a scalable and secure environment; enabling advanced, privacy-focused cross-media measurement; deploying AI-powered solutions across a wide range of marketing use cases; and improving operational efficiency while optimising technology and data integration. Those four goals map fairly directly onto four stages of data maturity - collect, measure, automate, optimise - and most MENA advertisers are at different points across those stages simultaneously.

The announcement does not specify client names, implementation timelines, or the number of brands expected to participate in the initial phase of the rollout. The focus on the composable architecture approach - rather than a single proprietary tool - suggests the rollout will be client-specific in its configuration, even if the underlying technology stack is standardised across engagements.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Annalect, Omnicom Media's data and analytics division, headquartered in New York with more than 5,000 data professionals globally, and Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company. The MENA initiative is led by Dr. Hoda Daou, Managing Director at Annalect MENA, and involves Ahmed Salem, Partnerships Director for MENA and Turkey at Snowflake.

What: A partnership to deploy composable data architecture, agentic AI marketing intelligence and privacy-focused cross-media measurement for Omnicom Media clients across the Middle East and North Africa. The technical implementation uses Snowflake's Cortex AI, Data Clean Rooms and Snowflake Marketplace alongside Annalect's data engineering and analytics capabilities.

When: Announced on 14 May 2026, for immediate release, from Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Where: The initiative is targeted at the MENA region, with the Annalect MENA operation based at Dubai Media City, United Arab Emirates.

Why: Brands across MENA face fragmented data environments - customer records, media delivery data and transaction data held in separate, disconnected systems - alongside increasing pressure to demonstrate marketing accountability and comply with evolving data protection requirements. The partnership aims to provide a unified, cloud-native architecture that enables cross-media measurement and AI-driven optimisation without requiring data to leave a controlled, privacy-compliant environment.

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