Marketing in Oman — what you are allowed to do, then what works

You do not need a licence to promote your own shop on your own Instagram account. You very possibly do need one to promote somebody else's — and if you are paying an Omani influencer or a freelance marketer, they need one, and most of the people asking for your money do not have it.

The licence exists — and you are probably exempt from it

Oman licenses marketing and promotion carried out on websites and social media. The instrument is Ministerial Decision 619/2022, issued by the Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Investment Promotion on 21 December 2022, published in Official Gazette 1473 on 25 December 2022, and in force ninety days later — applied from 24 March 2023. It runs to fifteen articles.

Article 2 states that the activity may not be practised without a licence from the competent department. The same article then carves out the exemption that decides this question for most readers of this page: «ويستثنى من الحصول على الترخيص الأشخاص الذين يمارسون أعمالا غير ربحية كالأعمال الخيرية والتطوعية، والأنشطة التي يقوم بها التاجر للسلعة أو الخدمة التي يبيعها أو يقدمها بنفسه» — exempt are persons carrying on non-profit work such as charitable and voluntary work, and the activities a merchant carries on for the goods or services he himself sells or provides.

The person you pay is not exempt

This is the part worth knowing before you sign anything. The exemption in Article 2 is drafted around the merchant selling his own goods. An influencer, an agency or a freelance marketer taking your money to promote your product is doing none of that — they are practising the licensed activity, for a fee, on behalf of somebody else. They need the licence.

The practical version of all of that is one sentence: ask for the licence number before you pay. Article 9 obliges the holder to display it, so a licensed marketer will have it to hand and an unlicensed one will change the subject. The Oman Observer reported 1,080 such licences issued by the ministry's Department of Commercial Affairs and E-Commerce over roughly the first months of the scheme — a small enough number that you should not assume the person pitching you holds one.

The law most guides still cite was repealed

A great deal of published guidance on advertising in Oman rests on the Publications and Publishing Law, Royal Decree 49/84. That law is gone. It was repealed by Royal Decree 58/2024, the Media Law, published in Official Gazette 1570 on 10 November 2024 and in force from the following day. If a page you are reading dates its advertising rules to 1984, it has not been updated in two years.

Where the two ministries do not agree

The Media Law puts advertising back under the Ministry of Information. Article 9(5) of RD 58/2024 lists «أنشطة الدعاية والإعلان» — advertising and promotion activities — among the media activities that require a ministry licence. The detail came in the Executive Regulation, Ministerial Decision 165/2025, issued 11 September 2025 and published in Official Gazette 1613 on 14 September 2025, with a 180-day window for existing licensees to bring themselves into line that expired around 14 March 2026.

Article 71 of that regulation opens: «لا يجوز لأي شخص طبيعي أو اعتباري القيام بنشر إعلانات أو بثها في وسائل الإعلام» — no natural or juridical person may publish or broadcast advertisements in the media. It then excepts three categories:

• licensed newspapers and audio or visual channels;
• licensed electronic media sites and platforms;
• shops, centres and commercial complexes, advertising «على واجهتها أو داخل هذه المحلات» — on their façade or inside those premises — about their licensed activities.

And it closes with a sentence that is doing a lot of work: «لا يجوز للمواقع والحسابات الإلكترونية الأخرى غير المرخص لها نشر إعلانات تجارية إلكترونية دون موافقة كتابية من الوزارة» — other unlicensed websites and electronic accounts may not publish electronic commercial advertisements without the ministry's written approval. Article 73 requires an advertising agency to obtain ministry approval before an advertisement is published or broadcast. Article 74 sets the content rules: advertisements must be truthful, must not promote tobacco or alcohol, must be clearly separated from editorial material, and must carry the approval number.

One further gap: MD 165/2025 refers repeatedly to a fee schedule attached as an appendix, and sets financial guarantees by reference to it. We could not retrieve that appendix, including from the Ministry of Information's own online library. So we cannot tell you what a Media Law advertising licence costs, and nor, as far as we can find, can any other published page.

Unsolicited messages: three instruments, and you have probably complied with none

Here is the scenario. A shop collects mobile numbers at the till — for the loyalty card, for the warranty, for the delivery. Six months later somebody exports the list and sends a broadcast about a sale. That is an ordinary thing to do and it engages three separate Omani instruments.

The data protection law

The Personal Data Protection Law, Royal Decree 6/2022 (Official Gazette 1429, 13 February 2022) deals with it directly. Article 22 requires the controller to obtain the data subject's written consent before sending any advertising or marketing material or material for commercial purposes. The penalty for breaching Article 22 is a fine of not less than OMR 1,000 and not more than OMR 5,000.

The Executive Regulation, Ministerial Decision 34/2024 (Official Gazette 1531, 4 February 2024), fills in what that means in practice at its own Article 22: obtain written consent, tell the person how the material will be delivered, give them a way to stop receiving it, and stop free of charge as soon as they ask. Businesses were given time to get into line — originally one year, then extended to two years by Ministerial Decision 6/2025 (Official Gazette 1580, 19 January 2025). That deadline was 5 February 2026. It has passed.

The telecommunications regulation

Separately, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority's regulation on the rights of telecommunications users — Decision 1152/2/3/2022/2, Official Gazette 1458, 11 September 2022 — devotes a chapter to unsolicited messages. Article 23 applies it to messages originating in or sent to Oman. Article 24 prohibits any person from sending spam or helping or inducing others to send it. Article 25 places obligations on the advertiser, not merely on the operator: secure the recipient's prior consent, include a free, effective and simple means of stopping the messages, and stop sending within one working day of a stop request.

It is worth being honest that the regulation is not perfectly consistent with itself. Article 25 requires prior consent, which is an opt-in rule. But the Article 1 definition of «الرسالة الاقتحامية» describes a message sent repeatedly to a recipient despite the recipient's request that it stop, which is an opt-out formulation. And a further point: the TRA opened a public consultation on new anti-spam and anti-fraud rules on 12 September 2024, closing 29 September 2024. As at the date on this page no resulting regulation has been published, despite reporting in February 2026 that one was imminent. The 2022 regulation is what is in force.

• Record consent at the point you collect the number, not afterwards — the obligation is on you to show it exists.
• Say at that moment what you will send and how, because MD 34/2024 requires the delivery method to be disclosed.
• Put a working stop instruction in every message, and honour it inside one working day at the latest.
• Do not treat a number given for a delivery or a warranty as consent to marketing. It is not the same permission.

WhatsApp: what a small Omani business can actually do

Start with Meta's own policy, because it applies to you regardless of Omani law. The WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy states: *You may only contact people on WhatsApp if: (a) they have given you their mobile phone number; and (b) you have received opt-in permission from the recipient confirming that they wish to receive subsequent messages or calls from you.* Both limbs, not either.

Then the distinction that decides what you build. There are three different things people mean by WhatsApp, and only two of them are products.

Meta also restricts whole categories of business. Alcohol, tobacco, over-the-counter and prescription medicines, medical and healthcare products, and gambling are restricted rather than banned outright — permitted only in certain countries, with the appropriate licensing, age-gating to 18 and over, and geographic gating. Firearms, illegal goods, adult products, dating services and multi-level marketing are prohibited entirely.

The commercial reality is worth stating plainly: in Oman WhatsApp is the default channel for talking to a business, and a click-to-WhatsApp link converts better than a contact form because it lands in an application the customer already has open and produces a reply they can see. We say that as an observation of how business is done here, not as a statistic — DataReportal publishes no WhatsApp user figure for Oman, so there is no number for us to give you.

What you may actually say in an advertisement

The Consumer Protection Law, Royal Decree 66/2014 (Official Gazette 1081, 7 December 2014) is enforced by the Consumer Protection Authority and governs the content. Article 20 requires suppliers and advertisers to act transparently and credibly and prohibits false and misleading advertisements. Article 19 requires the price, weight, production and expiry dates, product name, components, country of origin and specification number to be shown in Arabic on the goods themselves.

Article 31 is the one that catches ordinary shops. It prohibits a supplier from running promotional offers or price discounts without first obtaining a licence and approvals from the competent authority. The mechanics sit in Ministerial Decision 239/2013 (Official Gazette 1041, 5 January 2014): apply at least 15 days before the promotion starts, no more than four promotions a year, each running no more than two months, display the permit, and publish the winning numbers and winners' names in two daily newspapers where there is a draw.

The penalties are not nominal. Article 40 provides imprisonment from three months to three years and a fine from OMR 2,000 to OMR 50,000, or one of the two. Article 41 provides fines from OMR 100 to OMR 5,000 for other violations. Article 46 provides administrative penalties up to OMR 1,000, doubled on repetition within two years. Separately, the Authority has cited Article 14 against sellers who chase and pester customers with unsolicited offers in person.

One sector line worth having: a private health institution needs a health advertisement licence from the Ministry of Health, published on gov.om at OMR 150, before it advertises — and the advertisement must match the services the institution actually provides. If you run a clinic, dental practice or pharmacy, our clinic and pharmacy licensing guide covers the wider position.

Outdoor advertising is a separate permission

A municipal advertising licence is not the same thing as your signboard licence, and the fees are set governorate by governorate rather than nationally. Al Dakhiliyah publishes its schedule on gov.om:

• wall advertisement — OMR 15 for a local product, OMR 20 for a foreign one;
• rooftop advertisement — OMR 30 local, OMR 45 foreign;
• street-side advertisement — OMR 45;
• posters — OMR 10; printed shopping bags — OMR 2; plus OMR 1 to submit the application.

Dhofar Governorate charges OMR 15 to approve printed advertisements, posters and flyers — including leaflets announcing discounts and offers — and its service page adds that you must also obtain approval from the Ministry of Information. Your shop sign is a different transaction with a different fee, and the official documents on it contradict each other; we set that out in the signboard and shop licence guide.

Does it have to be in Arabic?

For advertising, we found no Arabic-only mandate. Muscat Municipality's own commercial signboards guide permits a sign «باللغة العربية أو الإنجليزية أو كليهما» — in Arabic, or English, or both — with no requirement that Arabic come first or dominate.

For the goods themselves it is different: Article 19 of the Consumer Protection Law requires the price and product information to be in Arabic, and food labelling follows the GCC standard rather than an Omani one. There is also an unresolved conflict on signage. A 2014 law-firm reading of Muscat Local Order 25/93 held that the primary language of an advertisement must be literary Arabic, with English permitted only alongside it. The Municipality's own current guide does not say that. Both are Muscat instruments and we cannot reconcile them from published sources.

The channels, and the only numbers we will publish

Every figure below comes from DataReportal, Digital 2026: Oman, published 8 November 2025 on data from October 2025. Oman's population is given as 5.54 million, internet users at 5.28 million or 95.3%, social media user identities at 3.44 million or 62.1% of the population, and active mobile connections at 6.93 million, or 125% of the population.

Search is the other half. Statcounter puts Google at 95.21% of Omani search traffic in July 2026, with Bing at 4.05% and everything else under half a percent between them. That single figure is why a correct, verified Google Business Profile is worth more to a small Omani business than most paid campaigns, and why we wrote a separate guide on getting your business onto Google Maps in Oman.

What actually works, specifically here

With the rules established, the honest short list. None of this is a substitute for a product people want, and all of it assumes you are compliant with the sections above.

• Google Business Profile before anything paid. At 95.21% search share, being findable and correctly located is the highest-return work available. Oman has no postcodes, so your map pin is your address.
• A click-to-WhatsApp link everywhere — on the profile, in the bio, on the website. In Oman the enquiry that would be a form submission elsewhere is a WhatsApp message here.
• Instagram for anything visual, Snapchat for a young local audience. DataReportal puts Instagram reach at 2.80 million and Snapchat at 2.35 million; Facebook, at 1.75 million, is not where a new Omani consumer brand starts.
• Bilingual, not translated. Arabic and English side by side is normal here and legal for signage; machine-translated Arabic reads as a foreign business and costs you the local audience.
• A licensed marketer, with the number checked. Article 9 of MD 619/2022 obliges them to display it.

What no Omani instrument says

One absence is worth stating as a finding, because every Gulf marketing article implies the opposite. We could not find any Omani rule requiring an influencer to label a paid post. MD 619/2022 requires the licence number to be displayed and requires content to be truthful and free of exaggeration, but contains no article on disclosing sponsorship. MD 165/2025 requires an advertisement to be separated from editorial material, which is a rule aimed at media outlets, not at a personal account. Disclosure is good practice and it is what the platforms themselves require; as far as the published Omani instruments go, it is not a legal obligation we can point you to.

If you want the licence position checked before you commit a budget — whether your own activity needs one, whether the agency quoting you holds one, or whether your promotion needs a permit — our office in Al Ghubra handles the commerce ministry side of this and can look it up.