Creator Shortlists for Regulated Brands in the Gulf

You get twelve creators you can brief on Monday, and a written reason for each of the eighty to a hundred accounts I looked at and set aside. Three weeks. The reject file travels with the shortlist, because next quarter somebody senior will ask why a particular name is missing and the answer should already exist. What decides a yes: Delivered views, not followers. I take the last thirty pieces of content, use the median view count, then divide the creator's quoted rate by it. An account at 380,000 followers that medians 9,000 views on Reels is priced as a 9,000-view account or it does not reach the sheet. Follower count appears once, in a column, beside the number that matters. Where the audience actually sits. Gulf-facing accounts routinely carry majority audiences in Egypt, Iraq or Morocco. That is a real audience and occasionally the right one. It is not the audience a Dubai furniture retailer with three showrooms is paying for. The country split comes from the creator's own Insights export, requested before the first call, not from a third-party estimate. Licence status. Paid advertising by a creator in the UAE requires an advertiser permit from the UAE Media Council, or coverage under a licensed agency's permit. Saudi requires the GAMR advertiser permit. I check this before I watch a single video, because it removes roughly a fifth of any longlist and because the exposure sits with the advertiser. Arabic read by a person. Two years of Arabic captions, comment replies and duets, read by me. Sentiment tooling misses what ends a bank's campaign: a sectarian joke from 2023, a past promotion for an unlicensed trading app, a political post pinned during a regional flashpoint. This is the part that cannot be bought as software, and it is why the timeline is three weeks rather than three days. Snapchat, honestly: In Saudi, Snapchat carries reach no third-party tool can audit. I do not accept a screenshot. I require a screen recording of the creator's own Insights, handle visible, scrolling a 28-day window, and I watch the story completion drop between first and last snap. Creators who will not send it are declined, including well-known ones. Three were last year. What I refuse: I do not rank by engagement rate; on Gulf accounts it tracks comment-pod activity more closely than intent. I do not source from a roster that pays me to fill it, and I hold no talent-side agreements. I do not vet for a campaign whose product cannot lawfully be promoted where it is aimed, virtual assets in particular, and I will say so before invoicing rather than after. I do not build gifting or barter lists. Who this is not for: Brands wanting a hundred nano creators. The economics of that are real and somebody else should run it. Teams who have already signed the creator and want a file that says yes. I will take that work, and the answer may be no, in writing, with the reasoning attached. What you receive: One sheet, one row per creator: median delivered views by format, cost per delivered view at their quoted rate, audience country split, licence status and permit reference where held, category conflicts with named brands and their expiry dates, and up to three flags with source links. Plus the reject file, ordered by how close each name came.