Dubai

Growth in internet advertising market is driving increasing numbers of organisations to leverage low-cost options such as Google Adwords or Facebook Ads to target their customers.

Internet advertising is playing a key role in this transformation, with IDC forecasting a 27 per cent compound annual growth rate for spending in this area by Middle East and Africa businesses between 2013 and 2018.

“People are sharing videos more than ever before. This region is more sophisticated with more bandwidth. This region invented story telling and this region is about story telling, and video is the best way to tell a story. Businesses are using videos more daily now on Facebook and are witnessing fantastic results,” Nicola Mendelsohn, vice-president of Facebook EMEA, told Gulf News.

“We are very happy with the growth of Instagram and Messenger, which are over 200 million users.

One of the main things we want to make sure is that the businesses are taking full advantage of the suite of offerings we have. “

Facebook is still waiting for the regulatory approval process for WhatsApp.

“The regulatory approval for Oculus VR has just finished,” she said.

Oculus VR, the leader in virtual reality technology, was bought by Facebook for $2 billion in March.

When asked what is next from Facebook, she said that Facebook is trying out different things out of its creative labs. There is a “lot going on”.

Facebook sees growth in its ad spend as registered users are growing per quarter.

Facebook has registered a 12 per cent quarter-on-quarter increase in monthly active users in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) to 71 million in the second quarter of this year.

Out of this, 54 million are monthly active mobile users.

“The strength of the Mena story is the continuous move to mobile. Of the people that come back to Facebook every day, 72 per cent come back on mobile,” Mendelsohn said.

She said Facebook has 39 million daily active users and 28 million daily active mobile users.

“Of the people who come back to Facebook every month 76 per cent come back on mobile from the region,” Mendelsohn said.

She said that people-based marketing or personal marketing is the really big shift we are going to see and that will be our focus at the moment in the region and globally.

In many ways, she said that it goes back to how people have always communicated. So if I enjoy something and tell you about it, you are more likely to try it because we are friends.

“The innovative new advertising models facilitated by rising internet adoption are enabling organisations with limited advertising budgets to more fully participate in the advertising market,” said Sony John, program manager for telecommunications and media at research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

“The world of advertising is undergoing a seismic shift across the Middle East and Africa (MEA),” he said.

He said these wide-reaching platforms offer a much more cost-effective entry point than traditional advertising, making them particularly relevant for emerging markets such as MEA, where burgeoning economies and concerted government initiatives are spurring a rise in the number of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

“Now is the opportunity as we know about people and we are trying to replicate that in scale and it changes the way people create advertising and changes the way people buy media because they can talk to people in a way that is more relevant that it wasn’t possible before,” Mendelsohn said.