Thursday, Apr 19, 2012

Gulf News

Dubai: As expected, DSF 2012 played well across all available media platforms and did its part in pushing the UAEs ad spend estimates for the first quarter to $360 million (Dh1.3 billion), up 2 per cent from the $353 million a year before.

These numbers, from the Pan Arab Research Centre (Parc) and based on listed media tariffs were enough to retain the UAEs position as the number one advertising market in the region.

While Saudi Arabia achieved an ad spend of $311 million in the first three months, Egypt made a strong comeback after a year lost to the Arab Spring and the changes that it brought on. Ad spend was estimated to have grown by just over 50 per cent to $257 million from $166 million in the first quarter of 2011.

Apart from the DSF-related ad blitz, du and etisalat were first and third respectively among the UAEs top advertisers during the first quarter, the Parc numbers show.

While DSF was placed second in the rankings, there is still the question whether advertisers opted to be cautious about how their marketing dirhams were spent during this years campaign. Instead of going all out over the print, television and radio platforms, many advertisers chose to go in for less expensive below-the-line campaigns or in-store promotions to press their case with the target audience during DSF 2012.

Thats not surprising; most advertisers nowadays are looking for a quick return on investment [RoI] by engaging with customers at the point of purchase, said Nadim Khoury, group managing director at Grey Mena.

The advertisers caution also mirrored the sense of disenchantment among local consumers during the last quarter of 2011.

With this being the prevailing sentiment, advertisers thought it better to play safe with their ad budgets during the initial weeks of this year.

The smaller retailers especially relied on footfalls in the malls [rather than spend on advertising], said Tanvir Kanji, who heads Inca Tanvir.

Even then, the print media platforms both newspapers and magazines still managed to pull in a combined $264 million of the $360 million spent on advertising in the first three months. But the ad exposure of Arabic newspapers did slip sharply, by 7 per cent, according to Parc.

But there are also clear signals on the increasing fragmentation of the advertising dirham among competing platforms. Newspapers, which accounted for 71 per cent as recently as 2010, now have to make do with 57 per cent.

Surprisingly, television got hit with ad spend down 24 per cent in the first quarter.

TV meters

The delay in the launch of much anticipated TV meters dampened advertisers sentiments, said Shaharyar Umar, marketing director at Parc. But TV spending is likely to shoot up as the meters start producing the expected results in the coming months.

A clear understanding of how the individual sectors are performing or hope to perform can be seen from first quarter estimates. Malls and retail outlets were placed second as the heaviest advertisers, with hotels and tourism-related agencies coming third, on the back of a 23 per cent spike in spending.

But the auto sector recorded maximum growth, at 26 per cent. Among the laggards was the financial sector, which saw a 20 per cent dip in spending on advertising. The government sector accounted for 23 per cent of the overall monitored spending, but reduced its ad buys by 5 per cent.

By Manoj Nair, Associate Editor

Gulf News 2012. All rights reserved.