Something shifted in UAE boardrooms this year. The instinct to chase visibility gave way to something more guarded – a collective decision to protect what’s already been built rather than reach for more. The numbers bear it out: 72% of UAE companies overhauled their PR strategy over the last twelve months, and nearly half say their media coverage has been quietly shrinking in the background.
That’s the headline from an industry survey by PRHub.ae, a Dubai-based agency working across tech, B2B and consumer brands. The respondents span SaaS, fintech, retail, healthcare, logistics and real estate – a genuine cross-section of the UAE economy, weighted toward IT and SaaS (27.3%) and fintech, banking and insurance (9.1%). What emerges isn’t a single trend so much as an industry-wide recalibration, and it’s worth sitting with what that actually looks like in practice.
Resilience Over Reach
Ask any communications lead what changed this year, and the word that keeps surfacing is resilience. Not growth, not reach – resilience. More than 63% of companies say stability now sits at the center of their messaging, and 51% describe their brand voice as noticeably more cautious than it was a year ago. Thought leadership hasn’t disappeared, but it’s grown more measured too: only 36.4% are putting fresh investment behind it, a modest figure next to the appetite the region showed in headier years.
The caution isn’t just about messaging – it’s structural. More than a quarter of companies (28.1%) say they’re being far more selective about who they hire as an agency partner, and a full 25% have decided the safest move is to keep communications entirely in-house.
“The data points to a clear shift toward resilience-focused messaging,” says Vlada Lomova, CEO of PRHub. “We’re also seeing companies tighten their budgets and become more selective about partnerships.”
Where the Coverage Went
The retreat shows up most starkly in output. Nearly half of respondents (48.5%) say their PR activity and media coverage have declined over the past year, and 18.2% describe their tone as more neutral, more measured – a real departure from the louder, growth-first storytelling that defined the region not long ago.
And yet the channels themselves haven’t lost their pull. Social media remains the undisputed center of gravity, with 78.8% of companies naming it their most important platform, ahead of owned media like websites, blogs and newsletters (63.6%). Traditional media hasn’t been abandoned either – 51.5% still value it – and 42.4% continue to show up at events, even in a leaner year.
AI Is Rewriting the Job Description
If there’s a force reshaping the industry faster than caution itself, it’s AI. More than half of companies (54.5%) point to rising AI adoption as one of the defining shifts of the past year, and 51.5% cite the rise of digital PR and creator-led communications as evidence the old playbook is being rewritten in real time.
Executives are being pulled into that rewrite whether they signed up for it or not. Over a quarter of companies (27.3%) say executive social media presence now plays a genuinely strategic role, and 21.2% rank executive communications among the industry’s most sought-after skills. Meanwhile, the priorities underneath it all haven’t changed as much as the tactics have: brand awareness still leads (20.6%), followed by authenticity and reputation-building (14.7%) and business stability and stakeholder communications (14.7%).
Hiring for Crisis, Not Creativity
Here’s the clearest signal in the entire dataset: companies aren’t building out their PR teams to be more creative right now – they’re building them to withstand a hit. Media relations still tops the list of in-demand capabilities (63.6%), but the sharpest gains belong to AI and automation expertise (48.5%), analytics and measurement (45.5%) and crisis communications (42.4%). Read together, they describe an industry hiring defensively, for a harder operating environment that shows no sign of easing.
An Industry Perspective: BMW Group Middle East
Rami Joudi, Head of Corporate Communications at BMW Group Middle East, sees his own team’s year reflected in the numbers.
“The findings are both insightful and positively surprising,” Joudi says. “The report validates the strength of our PR strategy during a period marked by geopolitical events, where not every moment was a brand moment. Keeping our focus on our people and protecting the brand remained the right priority.”
An Industry Perspective: NESR
For Lubna Hamdan, Public Relations Advisor at NESR, the resilience narrative isn’t new – it’s simply become visible to everyone else.
“As a MENA oilfield services provider operating in markets at times of geopolitical conflict, resilience isn’t a communications trend we’ve adopted – it’s a reality we’ve operated within for years,” Hamdan says. “What this report highlights is a broader shift towards authenticity, localisation, and long-term trust. In periods of uncertainty, audiences respond less to polished messaging and more to credibility, proximity, and consistency.”
What Comes Next: Localisation and Founder-Led Content
The industry’s own forecast points toward something more grounded: Arabic-first storytelling, founder-led content and short-form video, all named as the fastest-growing areas ahead. It’s a vision of PR that trades polish for proximity – brands speaking in a more local, more human register than the pan-regional campaigns of years past.
And there are early signs the pendulum is already swinging back. PRHub notes a clear uptick in client requests and activity across sectors in May – a small but real signal that budgets, and the confidence behind them, are beginning to return.
