15 Aug 2026
The market is growing fast, but what will make it systemic is not talent — it is national data infrastructure and home-grown communication models rather than imported ones.
Aziza Umarova is the head of the “Zero Bureaucracy and Innovation Adoption” project office at the Agency for Strategic Development and Reforms under the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan. She explains why the market is short not of talent but of data — and what Uzbek marketing can teach the world.
Uzbekistan's marketing and advertising market is developing at a good pace. Strong professional players are emerging, and digital tools, analytics and modern communication formats are being adopted ever more widely. Calling it a fully systemic market, however, would still be premature.
The main barrier to that maturity is an acute shortage of quality data. We debate the concept of data-driven marketing at length, yet in practice business is desperately short of objective information on the structure of demand, demographics, real consumer behaviour, average basket size, regional differences and export and import figures.
Building a national data-management ecosystem holds enormous potential for the entire economy. Over the course of 2025 our Agency drafted and cleared a bill on a national data-management system. Unfortunately, the bill stalled at the final stages of approval, even though its adoption would have been a foundational step towards an infrastructure in which data becomes a genuine resource for competitiveness. The experience of developed economies is compelling: ecosystems of this kind can add up to 1.5% to GDP. Ultimately, the better a business understands its market, the more precisely it can decide what product to build, for whom, where to invest and how to compete effectively.
Looking at the sharpest problems facing the industry in Uzbekistan, several key knots stand out:
The industry is gradually becoming more transparent, and the dialogue between the public sector and business is far more active than it was a few years ago. Even so, the rules of the game cannot yet be called fully transparent and predictable.
The key task of the next stage is to make that dialogue institutional rather than occasional. It matters not only to hear out entrepreneurs' requests at forums, but also to show them what happens to their proposals inside the regulatory process. And here open data again plays the decisive role: the more objective information is available to every participant, the less room is left for subjective administrative decisions, and the more level the competitive playing field becomes.
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Uzbekistan is still underdeveloped. That situation, however, will inevitably change under pressure from consumers themselves.
CSR moved beyond classic one-off philanthropy long ago. Today it means a responsible attitude towards your own employees, your customers, the environment, product quality, and the way you handle information and personal data. The consumer of the future will choose not only the product itself, but the values of the company behind it. Social responsibility is therefore becoming a direct factor in market competitiveness.
The intellectual potential of our marketing industry is vast, and it lies in far more than technology alone.
Our market is not a scaled-down copy of Kazakhstan, Russia or any other country. Solutions that proved effective there are no guarantee of success here.
Uzbekistan has radically different demographics, a different language environment, consumption culture, income structure, regional specifics and behavioural attitudes. We need not simply to import ready-made marketing frameworks, but to build the capacity to create our own methodologies grounded in a deep understanding of the Uzbek consumer.
A vivid confirmation of that approach was the “Onasini emsin” campaign, which we delivered together with 605 Agency and Otabek Sharapov during World Breastfeeding Week — Gazeta.uz reported on the launch of the “Onasini emsin” campaign.
Alongside the advertising, we joined forces with the Republican Specialised Scientific and Practical Medical Centre of Paediatrics: we trained 15 breastfeeding consultants, launched a hotline and, most importantly, sat on the working group that adopted the large-scale “Programme for Supporting the Breastfeeding of Infants and Young Children”, approved by Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 636 of 09.10.2025.
We accompanied this new state programme with very simple, down-to-earth communication in plain Uzbek — and without an inflated media budget. We deliberately took the risk, and it paid off: the campaign achieved organic reach of about 15 million people with virtually no media spend, and won the Grand Prix of the Tashkent International Advertising Festival (TAF).
It is a clear demonstration that precise local understanding of an audience works more powerfully than an expensive universal international franchise. These are exactly the solutions Uzbekistan can offer the world: not necessarily sophisticated IT platforms, but a rare ability to decode a specific culture, language and pattern of behaviour, and turn them into communication models that work.
Marketing and advertising today reach well beyond purely commercial objectives and sales. They directly shape social trust, people's behaviour, information culture and even the quality of interaction between the state and society.
That is precisely why the professional conversation has to widen. Business, government, advertising agencies, universities, the IT sector, researchers and consumers themselves should meet regularly on a single platform. And the most critical part is drawing young specialists actively into that process: it is their thinking that will define the shape of our market over the next 5–10 years.