This ad above popped up in Facebook this morning. A farm for sale. The ad is in Arabic. What this means is that Facebook is starting to make money from local Jordanian advertising.
As someone involved in site publishing I keep hearing this conventional wisdom: online advertising in Jordan (and the rest of the levant) is still pretty dead. Site publishers can sell their advertising space easily in the Gulf, but not in Jordan or Syria.
Blame the lazy advertising agencies for that. They are more than happy make bucket-loads of money selling full page newspaper ads and big billboards. This is what they understand and this is what they will sell. It’s totally untargeted and totally inefficient. An ad for a western Ammani boutique in Al-Rai newspaper is seen by a shopkeeper in Tafileh, and a “land for sale” ad in Tafileh is seen by Taxi driver in Amman. But who cares (the advertisers should care).
Even in Dubai, online advertising departments are often treated like a nuisance by their conventional advertising corporate parents. They would happily throw them out and take their office space! And I can understand why. The WHOLE Arab online ad market in 2008 is estimated to be in the range of US$ 25 to 40. I swear I know some small, unknown online ad companies (with a dozen of employees) in the US that make that amount of revenue in one or two months.
This is ridiculous.
But it will probably change. And when it does, the agencies will be cut out of the game. The person who put up the “farm for sale” ad above didn’t place it through an agency. Similarly, anyone can now place ads on Google and reach people in Jordan. People are learning that without help from agencies.
This trend of self service adverting will only grow. In the US, sites like eBay and Craigslist have already destroyed the classifieds ad market for the newspapers.
The local Jordanian market and the wider Levant market need some pioneering companies who start appealing to small and large advertisers directly, offering them sensible and effective advertising solutions. Why aren’t more restaurants, coffee shops, toy stores, schools, universities etc etc advertising online.
My gut feeling is that there is a sizable potential in the non-Gulf markets for online advertising. It needs some client education and a little army of sales people to unlock this potential. Waiting for the big name ad agencies won’t help.
The ad above also says: “contact the owner directly”. It’s not just advertising agencies who didn’t make money from this farm, but also the real estate agencies. Welcome to disintermediation!
Comments
2 responses to “Super local online advertising: is Facebook the answer?”
Direct answer: YES
I’ve been recommending ppc in general (either google or facebook) for my clients for a long time, reasons is they only pay when some one clicks their ad, plus you can set your budget in advanced.. it doesn’t get better then this..
I don’t think we can blame the advertising agencies.. after all, they’re in it for the profit, and I don’t think there’s a lot of profit in it for them in the ppc’s
The keyword here is the media it self.. almost everybody uses google or facebook or email on a daily basis, if you got a media like this with an advertising system like that.. you got your self a goose that set to lay gold eggs!
nice post. Ah… I wish I can go back to Jordan now and work on this… inshallah in couple of years.