Media has always been the flip side of advertising. They are like passionate lovers that live off each other. They might disagree — sometimes heatedly — but they know that they are eternally bound.
One of the pillars of media in the Middle East is the newspaper that you are holding in your hands: Arab News. Celebrating 35 years of excellence bringing the world to the anglophones of the Middle East, and bringing them the world.
Arab News has shaped the ad industry in the Middle East. You can ask someone who has worked in advertising for 35 years, or someone who has worked in the industry for three months, about Arab News and they will only have praise for the daily. It has been part of almost every media plan for the last 35 years, and it has played an important role in the success of many products and services.
Going through the archives of Arab News is like reading the history book of the advertising industry in the Middle East. During the 70s and early 80s, ads that appeared in Arab News were laden heavily with copy, with minimal visual design. The caption was usually a straightforward description and price of the product or service. This was common in the international ad industry at the time. Then came reasonably priced design hardware and software that pushed advertising away from heavy copy into visually driven presentations. Ads were not straightforward anymore but rather had their own creative twists. Often these new predominantly visual presentations were eye-catching and required readers to linger a few seconds to contemplate the ad, which was precisely what marketers were looking for.
Arab News advertising went through the major changes. When it first started, advertisers had only the print medium to communicate their marketing messages. That niche had its first big shift in the 80s with the introduction of outdoor media in the region. The second-biggest change happened in the late 90s with the rise of the satellite channels. At first there were only a handful of channels, such as MBC1, Egyptian TV and Future TV. Quickly this and mushroomed into hundreds if not thousands of TV channels. Arab News weathered these changes with healthy year-on-year growth; a sign of its true value to advertisers. The late 90s and the early 2000s saw a flow of "localized ads" in Arab News, ads with a Saudi touch that understood the sense of humor, social norms and trigger points of Arab News readers.
That was an outcome of more and more creative agencies opening their offices in Saudi Arabia. In 2003, Arab News shifted to offering color advertisements, which gave advertisers additional creative freedom. It was also the year the government banned cigarette advertisements, but Arab News was ahead of that curve of corporate responsibility. Not a single cigarette ad has appeared in the newspaper since 1991. Arab News has been and will continue to be a pillar of the advertising mix in the region because the people that run this newspaper understand marketing, and they understand the importance of balancing the wants and desires of readers, and the requirements and needs of advertisers. This is something many newspapers fail to do.
(Bander Asiri is the CEO of Al-Khaleejiah Advertising & Public Relations)
