UGC-style creative commonly outperforms polished, studio-produced ads on GCC paid social because it looks native to the feed and reads as a recommendation rather than an interruption — audiences scroll past anything that looks like an ad faster than something that looks like a friend's video.
This holds across the UAE and Saudi Arabia in particular, where TikTok and Instagram Reels consumption is high and audiences are quick to spot overproduced content. It is not that polish never works — brand campaigns still need it — but for performance-driven paid social, raw and specific usually beats slick and generic, which is why Kando defaults to UGC-style creative for Gulf performance work.