Campaign Middle East's MENA Power List 2026 just named Tony Wazen, CEO of Publicis Media MENA, as one of the region's most influential media leaders. He has spent more than two decades building agency structures across the Middle East, and his profile is a useful mirror for anyone trying to understand how the talent agency model actually works here, and where it is starting to crack.
Wazen's career traces the shape of the traditional agency business almost exactly: holding company, regional hierarchy, client retainers, and talent treated as a resource to be allocated rather than a partner to be paid promptly. That structure has produced genuine industry leaders across the GCC advertising world. It has also produced the exact payment problems that freelance actors, models, DJs and creators in the UAE deal with every single booking cycle.
What the talent agency model was built to do
A traditional talent agency exists to solve a matching problem. Brands need faces, voices and skills for a campaign. Creatives need bookings that actually convert into paid work. The agency sits in the middle, takes a cut, and in theory speeds everything up for both sides.
In practice, the model that built careers like Wazen's was designed around big holding companies and retained accounts, not around the individual freelancer waiting on an invoice. Commission structures, exclusivity clauses and slow-moving approval chains work fine when an agency is managing a handful of marquee names with dedicated account teams. They work far less well for the thousands of working photographers, stylists, DJs and performers who make up most of the UAE's creative workforce.
Dubai has been explicit about wanting to grow that workforce rather than shrink it. The emirate's own strategy document set a target to more than double the number of creators based in the city, from 70,000 in 2020 to 140,000 by 2025. That is a huge volume of talent for a legacy agency model built for a much smaller roster to actually serve well.
Why the old talent agency model struggles at scale
The numbers back this up. Dubai's creative sector is not a side hustle anymore, it contributed AED 21.9 billion to the city's GDP in 2022, representing 4.6 percent of Dubai's total economy. A sector that size cannot run on relationships and spreadsheets alone, which is exactly how most talent agency operations in the region still function day to day.
The payment gap is the clearest symptom of a model under strain. According to Thrilla's survey of over 5,000 UAE creative professionals, 75% have waited six months or more to get paid, more than once. That is not a handful of slow clients missing a deadline. That is a structural pattern baked into how agencies, production houses and brands settle accounts across the UAE and wider GCC, and it hits the same freelancers the Dubai Creative Economy Strategy is actively trying to attract and retain.
A talent agency built on exclusivity and commission has little financial incentive to fix that gap. The agency gets paid regardless of how long the talent waits for their share. The incentives are misaligned from the very start of the relationship.
How a talent agency model looks different when it is built for creatives first
Thrilla was built in Dubai specifically because that gap exists and nobody else was closing it. Instead of charging commission on every booking, Thrilla runs on a flat monthly model for talent and keeps the platform completely free for clients, which removes any agency incentive to drag out payment timelines.
The platform connects actors, models, DJs, photographers, videographers, stylists, musicians and production crew directly with brands, agencies and production houses across the UAE, the wider GCC and Australia. No subscription or commission is charged to the people doing the hiring, so a casting director or brand can post a role without a fee attached to every placement. Talent instead pays a flat monthly rate rather than surrendering a percentage of every single job they book.
Thrilla is also building toward guaranteed on-time payments, with escrow-backed payments launching soon, aimed directly at the six-month wait that the survey data exposes. That is the part of the old talent agency model that most urgently needed rebuilding, and it is the part most traditional agencies have had the least commercial reason to touch.
What this means for talent and brands across the UAE and GCC
None of this makes the traditional talent agency obsolete overnight. Agencies like Publicis Media still run some of the biggest campaigns in the region, and leaders like Wazen still shape how brands think about reach and measurement across MENA markets.
But the agency model that handles large-scale media buying is not the same model that should be deciding whether a freelance photographer in Dubai waits four months for an invoice to clear. Those are genuinely different problems, and bundling them under one legacy structure is exactly why so many creatives across the UAE and GCC are moving toward platforms built around direct booking and transparent terms instead.
The shift underway is less about replacing agencies outright and more about giving talent a real choice that did not exist before. A creative in Dubai no longer has to accept a twenty percent cut and a vague payment date as the unavoidable cost of getting booked.
Thrilla exists to make that choice available, and the model it is building looks nothing like the one Wazen spent twenty years rising through. For talent, that means direct bookings and a clear monthly cost. For clients, it means free access to a growing bench of creative talent without an agency fee stacked on top of every invoice.
If you are a working creative tired of chasing invoices through an agency, join Thrilla as talent and start getting booked on your own terms. If you are a brand or production house looking to book talent without agency fees or long contracts, post a role on Thrilla as a client.
