18 Sep 2026
A view from Kazakhstan: in five to six years Uzbekistan's market has become one of the most dynamic in the region, and its further growth depends on competition, shared measurement standards and support for local business.
Vitaly Beyler is the founder of the advertising communications agency MediaInsider and the owner of grp.kz. He is the project's first international guest: a view from Kazakhstan on what makes the Uzbek market stand out and what it still lacks.
In Uzbekistan's marketing mission I see a serious attempt to build a professional framework of its own, grounded in ethnocultural context.
Uzbekistan has gone beyond the standard formats and brought into business practice not only the "halal" category, but also the Muslim ethical concepts of "falah" and "barakat", along with the traditional institution of "gap". In a community-driven environment like this, a product spreads through trust and recommendation, and advertising is built on honesty and respect for the consumer.
In Kazakhstan the professional community is paying less attention to this so far. The main focus has shifted toward regulating language parity: Kazakh takes priority in a 50-50 ratio with Russian. This is a strict requirement — without it, no campaign goes live. The "halal" category is widespread in the food industry, but a distinct national identity for Kazakh brands on foreign markets has yet to take shape, apart from isolated stories such as "Kazakh chocolate" or exports of premium lamb to French restaurants.
To reach the international level, a local product needs a systematic marketing framework around it. Kazakhstan is dominated by familiar international standards: the GRP metric, the base currency of television buying, arrived on our market together with the research giant Kantar.
It is a borrowed instrument, but an entirely objective one. A single global system of coordinates is both logical and pragmatic: multinationals of Coca-Cola's scale will not adapt to locally invented rules. Clear standards guarantee that foreign investors and international brands find a country's advertising environment transparent and predictable.
Using the same digital tools as the rest of the world — Google, Yandex, TikTok, Instagram — Kazakhstan has built up substantial experience in technology-driven media products. As early as 2009 we began developing online video advertising systematically through Videocom, today part of Video International Kazakhstan Digital. The groundwork for monetizing video content and OTT platforms was laid on our market as a testing ground for major international players.
On that foundation, Kazakhstan is growing its own on-demand services, reinforced by a leap forward in national cinema. Feature films in Kazakh are booming, taking over the domestic box office and reaching the international stage. The combination of mature video technology and explosive growth in local content is precisely the practical experience that can accelerate Uzbekistan's digital advertising sector.
The arrival of foreign services has proved a fundamental rule.
Competition is always the main engine of the advertising industry. It is the competitive environment that forces marketing tools to evolve.
We position our agency specifically for local business and remain the only national agency within our association, surrounded by large network groups. Local brands objectively have smaller budgets than multinational corporations of Procter & Gamble's scale, so the agency has to work harder: generate unconventional ideas and master new media channels.
That is why the grp.uz initiative looks both timely and promising. International brands have their marketing mechanisms fine-tuned at the global level, while domestic producers need systematic support in building competencies. A project that takes on the development of a professional knowledge base for local business gives the entire market an impulse toward quality growth.
Practical support for local business rests on the synergy between global marketing classics — 4P/5P, Trout's concepts, digital targeting — and their adaptation to national specifics. That requires close integration between business and university education: applied research, academic work, joint efforts with teaching staff.
Training young specialists should rest on an international foundation that is immediately refracted through the national communication channels in use today. In Uzbekistan that phenomenon is the enormously developed ecosystem of Telegram channels. Telegram resonated with the "gap" tradition — a culture of collective discussion and high trust within the community. It is a vivid example of how a traditional code shapes the specifics of media consumption. Entering the Uzbek market, a foreign brand should not move blindly through a dry purchase of inventory: close work with local partners is essential.
When building an advertising strategy, it is important to separate businesses by scale:
Practice — in particular a case involving the advertising of medical services — shows that targeted social media advertising delivers only the initial signal, while high service quality turns the customer into an active media channel. In Kazakhstan word of mouth is spontaneous and hard to measure. In Uzbekistan, drawing on ethnocultural tradition, it can become a systematic business tool for confirming quality.
Over the past five to six years Uzbekistan's advertising market has made an enormous leap: from stagnation to rapid momentum and high creative quality. International players opening offices in Tashkent confirms the country's status as one of the region's most dynamic growth hubs.
The maturity of the Uzbek creative sector is visible internationally as well. According to Askhat Uskembayev, the Cannes Lions representative in Central Asia who oversees the Young Lions competition, young specialists and agencies from Uzbekistan are winning places and holding their own on advertising's main stage in Cannes. The country has proved it can create world-class creative work — and that opens wide prospects for cross-regional cooperation.