Internet media monitoring crucial for regional growth

Advertisers and agencies alike are closely familiar with media monitoring. Media monitoring is the ongoing and systematic process of measuring ad spend across various media and specifically titles within that media.

This enables marketers to gain numerous insights into both category and competitive strategies, reveals seasonality, and provides that vital pulse on general activity across the media spectrum.

The only problem here is that the Internet is not invited. This means that this medium falls below the radar when marketers and agencies are analyzing spends and formulating plans. The Internet is out of sight, and hence out of mind.

Since the media monitoring reports are often the very first step in any advertising strategy development, Internet's absence here means that it will easily get overlooked in the media ideation process.

Just by featuring Internet here, we are highlighting it as a proper medium to be considered. When viewing media monitoring in this light, it becomes clearer just how an entire strategy can be affected by this lack of information.

The reasons for Internet's non-inclusion are obvious. Total spends place the medium at less than 1% of total ad spend in the GCC. But when you cease to look at the entire market and instead focus on spends within specific categories such as Automotive, Finance and Travel, for example, the percentage being allocated to online suddenly jumps.

There are brands and indeed entire categories that are highly active in Internet advertising and these spends are not being accounted for in the wider advertising industry. For this reason, and for the fact that Internet spends are growing exponentially clearly point to the importance of re-addressing this gap in data.

Media monitoring is not an initiative driven by neither agencies nor advertisers even though they stand the most to benefit. It instead lies with the Internet media itself who acknowledge this as a vital step in our industry growth and sophistication on par with our offline counterparts. In the end, a monitored industry will generate more media investment and if not for anything else, this should be the catalyst for change.