LemonAI

The offering

Predictive analytics for digital campaigns: deep learning run over a company's own user data to identify, in advance, which customers will be worth acquiring.

The task

Reach the region's largest online retailers and the banks that lend to their customers, in eight weeks.

Meetings booked

Companies introduced

UAE, Saudi Arabia

Markets

2 months from 2023

Engagement

Industries we sold into

E-commerceRetail and groceryBanking

A number we left out

The share of these meetings that went ahead was below the bar we publish at, so it is not on this page. The client and the companies are, because the work was real.

In 2023 we were hired for a two-month campaign that ran into December.

Twenty-five meetings booked with twenty-four companies, including most of the names that matter in Gulf e-commerce. On booking volume this was a good campaign.

It is also the clearest example in our records of a calendar problem. The engagement ran from October into the third week of December, and in this region the last weeks of December do to a booked meeting what rain does to an outdoor event. Budgets close, people travel, and a January reschedule is not a reschedule at all when the contract ends in December.

What we did

Two months in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, across online retail, marketplaces and financial services. 25 meetings booked with 24 companies.

noon, Talabat, Jumia, InstaShop, OpenSooq, Landmark Group, GMG, Virgin Megastore, Choithrams, Danube Home, Life Pharmacy, Lulu, Cartlow, Fordeal, Idealz, Raneen, Town Team, V Perfumes, Voga Closet, RushBrush and SWVL, alongside First Abu Dhabi Bank, ADIB and the Al Etihad Credit Bureau.

The calendar is a variable, and it belongs in the contract

We took the wrong lesson from this at first, which was that the team needed to confirm harder. The right lesson is that a short engagement should not be scheduled across the region's dead weeks unless both sides have agreed what that does to the number.

There are four periods a year in this market where held meetings fall away predictably: the end of December, the middle of Ramadan, the peak of August, and the fortnight around Eid. None of them is a surprise. All of them are on a calendar anybody can consult before signing.

We now say this before an engagement starts rather than explaining it afterwards. A client who knows a campaign covers three dead weeks can choose to start in January, extend by a month, or accept the number with their eyes open. All three of those are better outcomes than a report that reads like an excuse.

What it shows

Book the campaign against the market's calendar, not the client's fiscal one. State the dead weeks in advance, in writing, and let the client decide what to do about them. Any agency that only mentions seasonality in the closing report is telling you it did not check.

Every figure counted from the activity tracker.

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