On the sixth of March the authorities let the pound move, and within days a dollar cost close to fifty pounds instead of thirty. Every marketing budget signed in January stopped meaning what it said. This is the fourth significant repricing in two years. The useful question is no longer whether it happens again. It is how to write a plan that survives it.
Marketing budgets in Egypt are priced in dollars whether you like it or not
Google, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn bill most Egyptian advertisers in dollars, or in pounds at a rate they set themselves. When the pound moves, the pound cost of the same impression moves with it, immediately and without notice. Your revenue, meanwhile, is almost certainly in pounds. Your ability to raise prices lags the exchange rate by weeks or months. The Central Bank of Egypt publishes the official rate, so build your plan on that number.
That gap is the entire problem. A campaign that returned a comfortable margin in February can be underwater in March with no change in performance whatsoever. We now treat exchange rate exposure as an explicit line in every media plan. It states what share of spend is dollar denominated and what a twenty percent move does to blended cost per acquisition. It also names the rate at which a given campaign stops being worth running at all.
A hypothetical example shows the squeeze, and it is an illustration, not a client result. Say a campaign spends 1,000 dollars and returns 120,000 pounds in sales. At thirty pounds to the dollar, the spend is 30,000 pounds and the return is 4.0 for every pound spent. At fifty pounds to the dollar, the same dollars cost 50,000 pounds, and the return drops to 2.4 until your prices catch up. Nothing about the ads changed.
Plan in ratios, not in pounds
An annual budget expressed as a fixed number of pounds is a promise the currency can break. Express it as a share of revenue instead, or as a target cost per acquisition set as a percentage of gross margin. Both reprice themselves automatically when the pound does. Both also keep the conversation with finance anchored to profitability rather than to a figure that was accurate once.
Reset the benchmarks your team is judged against monthly rather than annually. Nothing drains a good marketing team faster than a cost per lead target set at a rate that no longer exists. Keep a parallel view of performance in constant currency as well, so you can tell a real decline from an arithmetic one.
What to cut and what to protect
The instinct when costs jump is to cut everything by the same percentage. That is the most expensive move available. It takes an identical slice out of the spend that compounds and the spend that is merely busy.
Protect three things. Branded search, which is the cheapest traffic you will ever buy and which a competitor will happily occupy the moment you vacate it. Our guide to a working Google Ads account structure shows how to keep it separate. Retention marketing to existing customers, because in a squeezed market a repeat buyer costs a fraction of a new one and the margin is better. And local creative production, since a shoot in Cairo is now dramatically cheaper in dollar terms than the same shoot anywhere else in the region. That is one of the very few advantages this situation hands you, and it is worth using while it lasts.
Cut the prospecting that was already marginal before the move. Cut the tools nobody logs into. Renegotiate annual software contracts, because the pound price of a foreign subscription is now the fastest growing line in most marketing budgets. Vendors are far more flexible than their pricing pages suggest.
Have the conversation before the next move
Agree a trigger with your finance team in advance. If the rate passes an agreed level, you review the budget within a fortnight and pause these named campaigns. Deciding that in a calm week is enormously better than improvising it in a panicked one. If you sell on delivery, also check how that changes your results, which we cover in our cash on delivery measurement fix.
Exporters and anyone earning in hard currency sit in the opposite position. They should be spending more, not less, while local media and local production are cheap in dollar terms. If you want a second opinion on how your plan holds up at a different rate, our paid media planning team runs that scenario regularly, and you can start it from our contact page.
