17 Oct 2026
Uzbekistan's advertising market has grown to $260 million, yet small and mid-sized businesses still work on gut feeling: advertising is not linked to sales, and payback is not measured.
Marat Aksanov is a co-founder of HITZ Agency and a performance marketer. He explains why Uzbekistan's advertising market is growing faster than its ability to measure returns, and what the country can offer other markets.
According to an estimate cited by Kommersant, Uzbekistan's advertising market grew by 30–40% in 2025, reaching roughly $260 million. There is noticeably more money in the industry, yet far from everyone has learned to measure its return. It is too early to call the market fully systematic.
Today, systematic work is mostly found in big business — banks, fintech, marketplaces and telecom operators. They build full-fledged analytics infrastructure, implement CRM systems and know exactly their customer acquisition cost (CAC) and customer lifetime value (LTV) for every communication channel.
Small and mid-sized businesses, by and large, still operate on gut feeling: they run targeted ads on Instagram, buy placements in Telegram channels and judge campaign performance by surface metrics — likes, reach and follower growth.
Real discipline begins when a business owner can name the exact cost of acquiring a customer and the revenue that customer brings in.
The core problem of local performance marketing is the lack of an end-to-end link between ad traffic and actual sales.
When a prospect sends a Telegram direct message or calls the sales team, managers often fail to log the lead in the CRM. As a result, the lead source is lost, ads keep being optimized for cheap clicks and messages, and the business pays for formal interactions while genuinely wondering why real revenue is flat.
The second critical factor is the talent shortage. Uzbekistan does have strong specialists, but nearly all of them are already taken: they work for large corporations, juggle several freelance projects or have moved to contracts abroad. For a mid-sized business, hiring an experienced specialist in-house is extremely difficult.
The rules of the game exist and are enforced ever more strictly. The On Advertising law works effectively, and the Committee for the Development of Competition and Consumer Protection regularly monitors advertising placements, including the blogosphere, promptly issuing warnings and reports even for minor violations.
The regulatory environment is evolving quickly. In particular, from November 1, promotional SMS messages and calls are allowed only with the subscriber's consent and are fully banned in the evening and at night (from 18:00 to 09:00). This is an entirely sound initiative to protect citizens' personal space, but companies whose sales have historically relied on SMS marketing need to adapt their business processes now.
Channels for dialogue with the government do exist — draft regulations are published on the regulation.gov.uz portal. The problem lies in the passivity of business itself: entrepreneurs and agencies very rarely come to the platform with a consolidated position, quantified calculations and concrete alternative proposals.
Corporate social responsibility in Uzbekistan rests largely on state oversight. When the regulator checks even minor wording in Yandex Direct or Google Ads banners, businesses are forced to fix shortcomings quickly.
However, following the rules only out of fear of inspections and penalties cannot be called mature responsibility. Genuine CSR shows up in simple, basic things:
Another crucial aspect of social responsibility is developing the labor market. Amid a talent shortage, companies that take on interns and systematically train them on real projects are making a long-term investment in the country's entire marketing potential.
Uzbekistan has strong intellectual potential thanks to a young generation of marketers who quickly master international courses and work with foreign clients. The only thing still missing is long-horizon experience, where a specialist develops a single product for several years and is directly accountable for its commercial results.
Uzbekistan's main advantage and unique competence is its hyper-developed Telegram commerce. Small and mid-sized businesses build complete ecosystems inside Telegram: from product showcases and service bookings to customer support, bots, Mini Apps and repeat sales. This is rare experience for the CIS, since in no neighboring country does the messenger have such total penetration. Globally, similar models exist in China (WeChat), Vietnam (Zalo) and Thailand (LINE), but Telegram's business infrastructure is objectively faster and more convenient.
The second distinctive feature of the market is the deep integration of installment plans into sales. In Uzbekistan, buyers decide based on the size of the monthly payment, so the chain of advertising, instant installment approval and sale has been fine-tuned to perfection and can be exported to other emerging markets.
On the technology side, there is no point in spending resources on building proprietary systems — Google Ads and Meta auctions in Tashkent run on the same algorithms as in Bangkok. It is more important to get basic analytics in order. Nor does it make sense to artificially translate English performance terms (CPC, CPL, CPA) into Uzbek — it matters far more to align terminology within the country, so that client and agency share the same understanding of where a lead ends and a sale begins.
Neural networks (ChatGPT, Gemini) open up enormous potential. The technology is new to everyone, and everyone starts on equal footing. Given that AI models already fully support Uzbek while high-quality expert content in the language remains scarce online, companies that start publishing their analytics and case studies in Uzbek right now will become the main sources AI models cite.
The industry's main brake is an information vacuum. The market lacks an independent, fully reliable estimate of its size, and there are no open benchmarks for cost per lead across niches. Businesses have nothing to compare their metrics against, and the government struggles to forecast the economic impact of new regulatory restrictions.
It is time for the industry to move from abstract conference panel discussions to a practical format. What is needed is a permanent working group of the largest advertisers, agencies, media platforms and the Competition Committee. New rules and laws should undergo preliminary expert discussion in such a group before official publication, giving businesses time and clear guidance to adapt.