Dubai has more marketing agencies per square kilometre than almost any city on earth. Some are excellent. Many are fine. A few will quietly burn a year of your budget and leave you with a folder of files nobody uses. The difference between the three is almost never in the pitch deck. It shows up in how they answer certain questions before you sign anything.
1. Who on your team will actually work on my account
The pitch is often given by senior people. The work is often done by juniors. Ask for names, titles, and the split of hours per week. If the answer is vague, the delivery model is vague. A serious agency can hand you an org chart for your account inside five minutes.
2. Is anything on this scope being subcontracted
Plenty of Dubai agencies white label production, media buying, or SEO to freelancers or offshore teams. That is not automatically bad. It becomes bad when nobody tells you. Ask directly, and ask what happens to your assets and access when the subcontractor is between engagements.
3. Show me a report from a live retainer client
Redact the client name if you have to. What you are looking for is the shape of the reporting. Does it show what shipped, what worked, what did not, and what changes next month. Or is it a wall of impressions and reach numbers that never tie back to a business outcome.
4. What happens if we underperform in month three
Every honest agency has lived through this. The wrong answer is defensiveness. The right answer is a clear escalation path: what gets diagnosed, who joins the call, what the exit terms look like if things do not turn around. If they cannot describe that path, they have not had the conversation before.
5. Who owns the assets, the ad accounts, and the tracking
This is where relationships go bad quickly. Ad accounts should be in your Business Manager. Domains and hosting in your name. Analytics and pixel access under your login. Get this in writing before the first invoice, not after the first argument.
6. Can you deliver in Arabic natively
Not translated. Written by an Arabic native, planned as Arabic first. The difference in performance is not marginal. Gulf audiences read the difference in a caption in the first two seconds. Ask to see live Arabic captions that agency has written this month.
7. What is the media minimum for meaningful performance testing
Any agency that tells you performance marketing works at any budget is trying to close you. A serious answer names a floor: enough spend to learn from statistically useful conversion volume inside four to six weeks. In Dubai that is usually somewhere around AED 20,000 to 30,000 per month in media. Below that, the noise is louder than the signal.
8. How do you handle client feedback rounds
The agencies that cost you the most money are the ones with no structured process for feedback. You end up in eight rounds of revisions on a Reel that should have gone live in week one. Ask about their revision cycles, their handover format, and their rule of thumb for when a piece is done.
9. What is the smallest engagement you will take, and why
This one is diagnostic. An agency that will take any budget for any scope will not have the discipline you need. An agency that names a real floor, with a clear reason, is telling you they know what they can deliver well. Both answers are honest. One is more useful.
The best interviews go both ways. If the agency is not asking questions of similar rigour back at you (about your business model, your unit economics, your existing content, your team), they are pitching, not partnering. Direction that turns into action needs both sides paying attention.
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Written by the Digital DirAction strategy team