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A strong corporate identity is no longer enough to shape how a business is perceived. Companies compete for attention and partnerships in a market where the person behind the venture is part of the brand itself.
For Andrey Trubetskoy, CEO and co-founder of Dubai-based marketing agency JETA, executive visibility is essential to how business works today. “People want to know who stands behind a company,” he says. “Even when the brand itself is well known, the face of the company matters enormously. It is a serious trust factor.”
Trubetskoy has spent nearly two decades in marketing. His career began with retail and sports marketing roles at Adidas before he moved into agency leadership and eventually co-founded JETA in 2022. Earlier work covered sports marketing and sponsorship, along with major brand activations, followed by more than a decade at e:mg (Effective Marketing Group). JETA now operates from Dubai across branding, digital, media, PR, events, and performance marketing.
“Deals are signed between people, not between logos,” says Trubetskoy. That principle is increasingly shaping how companies approach branding. Over the past three years, he has seen demand for personal-brand work rise sharply. Companies now build their corporate identity alongside the public profile of the people leading them. The same pattern applies to large businesses that have yet to establish a strong identity in a particular market.
“A few years ago that was rare,” he says. “Today it is becoming the default approach.”
More founders may understand the value of a personal brand; however, many still approach it as a bundle of tactics. They post more frequently, join exclusive communities, attend high-end events, or search for whichever platform promises faster reach. Identity and consistency often receive less attention.
“When it comes to personal brands, the most underrated element is branding itself,” Trubetskoy says. “Everyone starts with content and platforms, almost nobody starts with consistency.”
For him, consistency comes from recognizable signals. Visual style matters, as do tone and format. Repetition over time creates familiarity until audiences begin to recognize the person before the name even appears.
“That recognition is what turns random posts into a brand,” he says.
Trend chasing creates a different kind of audience. “You do not need to jump into every wagon that passes by. Be yourself and give that to the world,” Trubetskoy adds.
Talking about whatever is popular may generate engagement, but it does little to make the founder memorable. Trubetskoy prefers audiences that form around real expertise and a recognizable way of communicating.
The confusion between engagement and influence also extends to the offline world. Exclusive communities and high-profile events may put founders in the right rooms. This access can look remarkably similar to influence from the inside, but it doesn't mean that people outside these founders’ immediate circles know who they are or understand what they stand for.
“Access is not the same thing as visibility, and activity is not the same thing as influence,” he says. “You can sit in the right rooms and still be unknown outside of them.”
Personal-brand development, in his view, follows a sequence. Content needs somewhere to travel. Media presence can add credibility, while positioning gives the work a coherent identity. Founders who place too much faith in one channel usually return to square one after the expected results fail to materialize.
“In personal branding there are no shortcuts, there is only sequence.”
He says the commercial difference eventually becomes visible as well.
“The founders who accept a complete strategy get results that move their business KPIs. The ones who bet on a single magic channel usually come back later, and we start again, this time properly.”
A similar insistence on structure shapes the way Trubetskoy describes marketing in MENA. Regional clients expect activity to have a visible relationship with business performance.
“Everyone agrees that marketing has to serve the business. That is common ground everywhere,” he says. “The difference here is the degree, and the degree changes everything.”
According to Trubetskoy, the connection between marketing and business results in the Gulf is not an assumption somewhere in the background; it is on the table at every stage of the process. Even awareness campaigns bring questions about what the work should influence and how any effect will be measured.
Personal branding is beginning to face the same scrutiny.
Executive visibility has long been described through follower growth, impressions, media appearances, and the broader sense that somebody has become well known. Those measures reveal activity and reach. They say less about why some executives accumulate authority while others simply become more prolific.
Structured frameworks have begun to emerge around that gap. JETA is starting to use Voice, a methodology developed by INPUT Global communications agency, in its work with clients. Voice breaks personal-brand development into stages and pairs them with an index designed to assess reach alongside indicators of how effectively that reach is being used.
“I think the appearance of frameworks like Voice is a sign that the industry has matured,” Trubetskoy says. “For years the standard advice was simply to post more and stay active. Voice moves the conversation to a much more useful place: it breaks the journey into clear stages and forces you to find your actual bottleneck.”
Voice puts real audience reach at the center of its methodology. Median post performance helps prevent a single viral spike from dominating the picture, while other signals examine areas such as distribution and third-party authority.
With Voice, a founder with a distinct identity may still find that ideas rarely travel beyond an existing audience. Someone else may command significant reach, but their external recognition could remain weak.
“What I want to highlight is the clarity it brings to the entire ecosystem of personal brand work,” Trubetskoy says. “Every stage produces visible conclusions, triggers, and signals, so both the agency and the founder can see where the brand actually stands and what should happen next.”
For Trubetskoy, measurement changes the day-to-day work as much as the diagnosis. “It turns a process that used to rely on intuition into something you can actually manage,” he says.
However, no index can capture every dimension of reputation. Frameworks like Voice are designed as operating tools that identify weak links and help prioritize effort, rather than a definitive verdict on somebody’s influence.
When Trubetskoy and his partners began exploring MENA in 2022, Dubai stood out for the pace of activity. Startups were arriving, companies were opening regional offices and new ideas were moving quickly from discussion to execution.
“Everything here was boiling: the money, the ambition, the speed at which things moved,” he says.
The decision to establish JETA’s base there followed naturally. “We wanted to be part of this market and to make Dubai our headquarters, both for the Middle East and for our global business.”
Trubetskoy expects digitalization across the UAE and wider region to deepen, with AI and new economic models becoming increasingly embedded in the infrastructure surrounding businesses and incoming talent.
Inside JETA, artificial intelligence has already moved beyond occasional tool use.
“The industry is going through an unprecedented and very fast rise in expectations of how efficient an agency should be,” he says. “At this point we are not simply using AI tools in every aspect of our work, we are building entire AI ecosystems that the whole agency runs on.”
Greater efficiency also creates more competition for attention. AI has made it easier to produce polished material at speed, which leaves executives operating in an environment crowded with competent-looking content. Recognizability becomes harder to earn.
Trubetskoy still sees the region’s willingness to experiment as one of its biggest attractions.
“It is young, it is growing, and it is genuinely ready to try, ready to experiment, ready to listen,” he says. “Not every market in the world works like this, and for people in our profession this is a gift.”
That appetite is part of what keeps him optimistic about working in MENA. It also leaves founders with little room to hide behind corporate accounts. More executives are speaking, more content is being produced, and the fight for sustained attention keeps getting harder. Trubetskoy’s preference remains decidedly unflashy: give people something recognizable, then build enough coherence around it for the work to travel.
“You can produce great content and still stay invisible because nothing connects it together. Give it a clear identity and consistent direction, and every piece starts building recognition.”
Andrey Trubetskoy is CEO and co-founder of JETA, a Dubai-based omnichannel marketing agency founded in 2022. He has nearly two decades of experience across marketing, brand activation, client services and agency leadership, with previous roles at Adidas and e:mg (Effective Marketing Group). His work has involved global brands, including Coca-Cola and Hyundai, while JETA’s portfolio has included companies such as Visa, Asus, and Heineken.
