"Open dialogue builds the market": an honest diagnosis of Uzbekistan's marketing

Nikita Zamakhin is a performance-marketing expert (GG ADS, UNIKA Agency). In Tashkent, he is rolling out AI agents, automation, and predictive analytics at Silicon Valley standards. In conversation with GRP.uz, he offers an honest diagnosis of how mature marketing is in Uzbekistan — and explains why open professional dialogue doesn't destroy the market, but builds it.

---

Systematic marketing doesn't exist yet — and that's an honest diagnosis

Systematic work emerges where strategy, funnel, and end-to-end analytics are fully synchronized, and where businesses see marketing not as a cost line, but as an engine with measurable output.

"Here, companies still launch targeted ads blindly, run social media without understanding their audience, and expect SMM specialists to simply produce 'pretty pictures.' Players ready to build end-to-end systems from the first touchpoint to repeat purchase are a rare breed in this market," says Zamakhin.

Three root problems behind the immaturity

This immaturity gives rise to a whole set of deep-seated problems:

• No culture of measurement. Most entrepreneurs work on gut feel, without knowing the basic metrics — CAC, LTV, ROAS.
• Price dumping and eroded standards. After a three-week course, people call themselves ad specialists and charge next to nothing — and the disappointed client loses trust in the industry as a whole.
• Algorithmic blindness. Meta Ads, Google, Telegram are highly complex systems. The pixel seems to be installed and "firing," but the data comes in wrong, and no one inside the company understands why.

The rules of the game — a murky grey zone

There are no industry standards, no coherent regulation of native advertising or mandatory disclosure of sponsored content. Dialogue with the government is minimal: IT Park is making excellent moves for the tech sector, but marketing and advertising remain outside its focus. Nor are there any authoritative associations able to shape the rules of the game — the market is growing explosively, yet agencies operate without contracts and dodge taxes.

It's in the government's interest to bring order here — not through bans, but by creating rules: agency registries, licensing, and tax incentives for those who operate above board.

Social responsibility is a professional baseline

Responsibility shows up not in one-off PR stunts, but in daily work on three levels:

• Toward the client — not selling smoke and mirrors or promising a thousand leads for two hundred dollars.
• Toward the market — producing educational content, explaining to businesses how funnels and algorithms work.
• Toward society — upholding content ethics and refusing manipulative tactics.

The intellectual potential is enormous

Uzbekistan has three strong advantages. First, a young, multilingual population capable of creating content across three cultural contexts at once: Uzbek, Russian, and English. Second, a strong mathematical tradition: marketing is turning into pure mathematics (attribution, predictive models, algorithms), and our specialists have the fundamental grounding for it. Third, a unique cultural context (the Silk Road, architecture, cuisine) that the world has yet to truly discover. "We are capable of building world-class lifestyle brands and becoming Central Asia's leading tech hub — if we stop selling ourselves cheap."

Enough whispering behind closed doors

Cutting-edge methodologies and case studies already exist in Tashkent — but they stay behind closed doors. What's needed is a culture of documenting experience, open market research, and, above all, open public discourse instead of conversations in private chats driven by fear of criticism or competition.

Open professional dialogue doesn't destroy the market, but builds it.