MENA Momentum: 12 Trends for 2014
by Boye Balogun, Victoria Loesch, Richard Fitzgerald, Tamer Auf, Mindshare
Mindshare MENA brings you the global and regional trends across the advertising, media and marketing industries for the year ahead. We highlight the insights and implications for businesses, brands and advertisers preparing you for the changes, challenges and opportunities of the next 12 months.
1. The 5 Second Media
It used to be that brands only had the golden 30 seconds to communicate a message through TV but deeper engagement times on digital platforms changed that. With our even busier lives, the "do more” mentality and the infiltration of technology in every aspect of society, attention is a sparse commodity.
With more information, more channels and more media messages thrown at consumers, there is simply not enough attention bandwidth for people to process all of it. Less is now more, hence the rise of quick communication platforms and media such as Snapchat, Vine and Shazam in addition to shorter more visual ads across media channels.
Brands have less time to communicate the message so media, creative and platforms will have to adapt to this faster pace.
Implications
- Shorter formats creative and more story visualization
- Sign-posting to online destinations for deeper engagement becomes even more important
- Advertisers will require a change of approach from agency partners to adapt to the new pace
- Many brands will focus on increased frequency, shorter bursts in planning media
- Digital channels will benefit from this trend and so will social media networks
- Digital Media publishers will introduce more “snap” formats to support this trend
2. Mobile First (Super Trend)
This shouldn't come as a surprise but the first screen is the screen people spend the most time on, and it is almost always a mobile screen. Mobile is personal, private, preferred and present and it’s the ultimate link device between social and TV and increasingly becoming a control device for many other home and office technologies.
Mobile is transforming everything from communication to content and engagement. The changing consumer behavior and usage, aided by TV operators like MBC & OSN making content available on mobile & tablet devices has already placed mobile as the first screen. Advertisers are fast coming around with UK and MENA mobile adspend both increasing by well over 100% respectively year on year.
TV is still the ultimate viewing device but with the "on the move" generation, mobile is first across devices, channels and media in meeting the multi-purpose demands for consumers and advertisers. We expect to see a major acceleration in adspend growth supported by the already solid mobile penetration in the MENA region and increased emergence of an ecosystem across app developers, mobile publishers and networks.
Implications
Increased competition in the mobile publisher space as they come under pressure from traditional digital players.
- Mobile will provide a channel for better digital creativity & targeting in the MENA region
- Expect to see more mutli-screen campaigns with mobile as a key component
- Brands have to focus on the mobile space across Paid, Owned and Earned or they will lose ground to competitors
- Mobile payment usage and platforms will become more popular and with that M-commerce in general
To continue reading, download MENA Momentum: 12 Trends for 2014, (pdf, 468 kb)