5 Aug 2026
The market’s infrastructure is already in place, but there are still no shared standards, no end-to-end metrics and no methodology of our own — Uzbekistan remains entirely in the wake of borrowed thinking.
Akmalxon Ashurov is a business trainer and coach, founder of Turan Group LLC (Thailand) and a lecturer at the Banking Department of TSUE.
A conversation about the current state of marketing and advertising in Uzbekistan cannot open with the reassuring verdict that «all systems are running normally». To put it plainly, this field cannot yet be called fully systemic. Yet as both a lecturer and a practitioner, every year I see the positive vector more clearly: the market is moving slowly but inevitably from a chaotic state towards maturity.
The infrastructure for this maturing market is already being built. For more than ten years the Marketing Association of Uzbekistan has brought over 200 brands and agencies under its wing, and platforms such as the Tashkent Digital Marketing Forum and the international advertising festival TAF!26 have gained real weight. These are no longer scattered initiatives of enthusiasts but genuine signs of an emerging industry. The problem lies elsewhere: we still have no shared professional standards.
Colleagues in the trade put it very precisely: one contractor sells the client a strategy, a second sells reach, a third sells access to bloggers — and in the end the client has no idea what specific result they paid for. The market lacks a common methodology for measuring effectiveness, end-to-end metrics that every side understands, and a code of ethics. The industry is stuck in a transitional phase where the infrastructure runs ahead of the working standards of most companies.
In the lecture hall with students and in practical sessions with businesses, I single out seven key pain points that are holding back the development of marketing in the country.
Assessing the rules of the game, one has to admit they are only partly transparent, and the state’s dialogue with business still looks more like a regulatory monologue. There has undoubtedly been progress. Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 428 of 2023 introduced electronic monitoring of outdoor advertising («Tashqi reklama») and moved billboard placement to open auctions via E-auksion and the Unified Portal of Public Services, which has considerably levelled the field for honest players. The Law on Electronic Commerce also gave business legal certainty.
In practice, however, the system keeps slipping. Monitoring in that same year, 2023, found that 35% of billboards — more than 3,000 sites out of the 9,000 inspected — were being operated in breach of the law. At the same time, the new edition of the Law on Social Partnership, which was meant to give business the right to take part in shaping the regulatory environment, was never adopted. The state sets the framework from above and business adjusts to it, whereas what the market needs is a full-fledged institution of public-private partnership.
Another striking feature of our market is a distorted understanding of corporate social responsibility. In most domestic companies, CSR is reduced to one-off charity: hand out food parcels for a holiday, stage a photo session with the logo for the report, tick the box. This approach only cements the unequal relationship between «giver» and «receiver»; it solves none of society’s systemic problems.
CSR is not about how a company spends its money, but about how it earns it
Real responsibility is built differently: strategy instead of image, with CSR woven into the business model itself; long-term partnership with NGOs instead of one-off gifts; measurability, with regular reporting and an assessment of how significant the goals are; inclusion and environmental care in substance — adapting workplaces for people with disabilities instead of handing out presents, cutting packaging and introducing recycling instead of issuing declarations. Encouragingly, the industry is beginning to recognise these demands of the times: the arrival of the Social & ESG Campaigns category at the TAF!26 festival is an important step towards recognising projects that change society rather than merely decorate annual presentations.
Since 2017 the number of IT companies in the country has grown from 147 to more than 1,500, creating over 24,000 jobs. Exports of IT services leapt from USD 600 thousand to 300 million in 2023, and the bar for 2030 has been set at 5 billion. The talent base is underpinned by state programmes: 1.2 million people have gone through training under the One Million Programmers project, and 60 specialised universities graduate 29 thousand specialists a year in AI, Data Science and cybersecurity.
Today we are already able to share a unique experience with the world. It is a model of ultra-fast digital transformation, in which a country travels from basic connectivity to 94% internet coverage in five to seven years, and does so in a complex bilingual market. It is a phenomenon of deep localisation of global tools — turning Telegram into a key marketing and commercial channel and successfully scaling local services such as Korzinka Go and OLX. And it is youthful digital capital: a population with an average age of around 28 and a high level of digital adaptability.
For all this technological drive, an obvious weakness has to be acknowledged: in terms of methodology and terminology, Uzbekistan is still entirely in the wake of borrowed thinking. We make active use of imported concepts — SMM, SEO, KPI, CTR, programmatic — while the Uzbek-Russian marketing vocabulary grows mainly through direct transliteration.
Most working methodologies are adapted Western frameworks or solutions taken from the practice of neighbouring countries. We have no local cases that have made it into international marketing textbooks, and academic research activity in global scientific databases remains critically low. Technology is adopted quickly — from AI personalisation to VR tools — but building our own conceptual and academic base takes time, investment in R&D and close integration between academia and real business.
Marketing is not merely a sales tool; it is part of a country’s economic infrastructure. The competitiveness of Uzbek exports, the country’s appeal to investors and Uzbekistan’s unified international brand depend directly on its quality. When 35% of outdoor advertising operates in breach of the rules and clients do not understand performance metrics, the losses are borne by the entire economy.
A new generation of consumers and professionals — an audience of 8.7 million Instagram users and hundreds of thousands of graduates of digital courses — demands ethical marketing, data protection and quality content. To travel from a chaotic market to mature standards, and from unsystematic borrowing to the creation of our own intellectual products, Uzbekistan needs a permanent working platform: professional discussion must move beyond Tashkent into the regions, universities must modernise their curricula for data-driven and AI marketing, and business, the state and academia must learn to speak the same language.