A decade ago, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) knew marketing mainly through traditional advertising and public relations, industry events and trade shows. No one imagined it could be done differently.

1. Reprinted from the January 26, 2015 e-newsletter. © 2015 Quirk’s Marketing Research Review (www.quirks.com).
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Adecade ago, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
knew marketing mainly through traditional advertising,
public relations, industry events and trade shows. No one
imagined it could be done differently.
In recent years the Internet penetration in the MENA
region has been growing at a remarkable pace, reaching the
global average in 2014 for the very first time. This is coupled
with a mobile penetration rate that is estimated at 110 per-
cent and a social media penetration that is often at a higher
rate than the world’s top 10.
Due to the constant increase in use of computer and mo-
bile technologies, more and more organizations have inte-
grated new media into marketing plans. They are slowly but
surely becoming used to the concepts of digital, social media
and e-mail marketing, as well as online market research.
The business of social media in the MENA region
Facebook is the most popular social media network in the
MENA region, with over 81 million users, followed by Linke-
dIn with about 8.5 million and Twitter with 6 million users.
At a recent information session held by YouTube for Google
Partners in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, figures were shared
to illustrate that Saudi Arabia has the world’s top per capita
users of YouTube.
As social media continues to grow in the region, organiza-
tions are learning how to manage their reputation in an envi-
ronment where they have increasingly less control over how
their brand is managed, due to the fast, free flow of ideas on
social media networks.
Advertisers and marketers are engaging more and more
with social media platforms in order to monitor and influ-
ence opinions of their brands. There are now at least five
high-quality providers of Arabic social media monitoring
services in the United Arab Emirates, giving brands real-time
visibility on what people are saying about their products or
services.
Even though organizations are still investing heavily in
traditional advertising, digital and social media marketing
are taking in a bigger share year by year.
In the past, not many Dubai organizations developed a
customer database, primarily because of the rapid economic
growth and the inability for marketers to keep up with the
pace of development. This led to professionals forming their
own marketing strategies without significant research to back
up such strategies.
One of the changes in the last few years has been the inte-
gration of sophisticated database software – often in conjunc-
tion with a customer relationship management system – to
keep up in today’s competitive environment and increase
both sales and customer satisfaction, which in turn leads to a
higher demand for e-mail and SMS marketing.
Online research becoming slowly more palatable
The market for online research has been moving very fast in
Europe and the U.S. and although the MENA region remains
the smallest it is set to see dramatic growth, looking at the
New media’s marketing
potential in the MENA
region
| By Tamara Deprez and Maha Ahmad
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2. To purchase paper reprints of this article, please contact Quirk’s Editor Joe Rydholm at 651-379-6200 x204 or at joe@quirks.com.
most frequently logs on) to enable a value-for-money, person-
alized, time-effective online advertising campaign.
A large number of organizations have already started inte-
grating fully-fledged new media campaigns into their market-
ing budgets. Others are catching on slowly, and marketing
experts can help fill this gap and educate businesses on the
importance of this new and exciting age of unprecedented
marketing initiatives.
Editor’s note: Tamara Deprez is founder and managing partner of
Dubai-based marketing consulting firm The360mix. She can be
reached at tamara@the360mix.com. Maha Ahmad is partner of The
360mix and can be reached at maha@the360mix.com.
number of new Internet users every year and the number of
local market research firms adopting this innovative method.
For example, MENA Opinion recently launched Re-
searchii, an online community that rewards members for tak-
ing part in surveys and polls. Targeted at the general public,
Researchii aims to create a community of consumers who
participate in online surveys and polls on topics that concern
their specific areas of interest.
The growth of Internet penetration means that online re-
search is more important than ever for regional advertisers.
With sufficient online research, advertising companies will
now be able to effectively target the correct demographic,
gender, age range, interests and habits (such as when a user
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