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Bull and bear
Lebanon’s online advertising is stuck somewhere between short selling and low risk taking by Vanessa Khalil
A
© Corbis
re we getting there? Looking back on the progress
of Lebanon’s digital industry in 2012, Charbel
Kahaleh, head of digital at Vertical Media Services,
is slightly more diplomatic than the year before
and speaks of ecosystem players in a positive, yet
cautious tone. He also leaves little doubt as to just
how much the country’s few agency digital wizards
have bonded with third-party agencies, publishers
and monitoring platforms. It is, after all, a matter of
mutual funds and interests in an industry that has,
so far, fallen short of its full potential in Lebanon
– more than elsewhere in the region; which is why
it comes as no surprise that Kahaleh is happy that
the digital media industry in Lebanon is shaping up
in the first place. He says: “Online in Lebanon is
now a mass media and needs to be treated as such.
You can no longer settle for a $2,000 campaign
and consider it as a mass one […] The market is
reorganizing itself and clients are pushing for bigger
activity online. The third-party agencies, somehow,
reshuffled their services away from media and into
app development.” And big players, such as Choueiri
Group, he adds, have returned to their core business
as official media reps of online platforms, after a
short-lived stunt of playing MBUs for their portals
and others in the market.
Clients see, clients do. Indeed, Lebanon’s
digital advertising market is showing some signs
of maturity, or at least, puberty. Figures released by
research firm, Ipsos, showed that online advertising
in Lebanon boasted a 29 percent growth in 2012,
even though it held a minuscule share of the overall
advertising spend in the country – which also posted
a 4.5 percent increase in the same year.
Azmi Taybah, account executive at MEC, says
that the market has reached a point where at least
one player in each of Lebanon’s key industries
allowed trial, accepted error and came out on top
in the online game. “Zaatar W Zeit is an example, and more recently, Almaza. On the flipside,
big advertisers such as XXL and Buzz that spend
millions of dollars on TV, could not translate their
success on digital media,” says Taybah. In fact, local
risk takers spearheaded a remarkable transition of
some unexpected advertisers to digital, primarily
social media. Real estate developers ranked among
the biggest online advertisers last year, allocating
approximately ten percent of their budgets to digital media, says Jorj Ghazal, managing partner at
online solutions agency, Wink, and conceptual ad
agency, Icetulip.
Lucas Lamah, managing partner at lifestyle and
entertainment portal Beiruting.com, says that since
he set up the site in the late 1990s, attracting a wide
portfolio of advertisers had topped his priority list.
Although he says the budget per user has quadrupled
in just one year, he’s not particularly pleased with
luxury brands’ reluctance to spend on online portals
and Lebanese real estate companies’ reluctance to
spend on his. He explains: “They [real estate clients]
Charbel Kahaleh.
Head of digital at Vertical Media Services
Azmi Taybah.
Account executive at MEC
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different views. Clients, agencies and publishers in Lebanon are all for digital growth. But they are yet to see eye to eye
Jorj Ghazal.
Managing partner at Wink and Icetulip
Lucas Lamah.
Managing partner at Beiruting.com
Rasha Rteil.
Digital strategist Levant and
senior exchange manager at Mindshare
are more on Google ads and social media than they
are on sites; and they usually prefer to be on political
sites. In my opinion, it’s extremely wrong to put
budgets on political websites that could be read by
older people, while those who buy houses are in
their early 30s,” he points out. Instead, he says that
2013 is the year for Lebanese banks to advertise
their e-offerings and mobile products to the younger
segments “in their natural habitat” hoping to attract
new customers – when most of them had steered
clear from digital advertising up until 2012.
Kahaleh says: “There is no rule for how budgets changed; [travel agency] Kurban Travel took
a strategic decision this year – it wants to rejuvenate the brand and recruit new clients, who are
online, probably younger, active, connected and
with purchasing power. There is no average growth
percentage, but many clients started spending on
online for the first time this year.”
Devil in the details. The lines remain blurred
as to who does what on digital media. A campaign
by Mindshare for Vape two months ago – in line
with Impact BBDO’s offline activation for the brand
(see Communicate Levant, July/August 2013, page
eight) – revolved around a virtual mosquito haunting
online users as they surfed from one page to another,
through an ad that asked them to “protect web pages
from the mosquito attack” and redirected them to
a Facebook app. “They [users] needed to log in to
the app and recharge [the Vape mat] every 12 hours.
When they wouldn’t, the ad would follow them
and the mosquito would keep buzzing around their
Facebook page,” explains Rasha Rteil, digital strategist
Levant and senior exchange manager at Mindshare.
Such activations might give the impression that
Lebanon’s digital media has grown so remarkably
well to take in out-of-the-box ideas; but, in reality,
this is a change that has been felt only on international media – social in particular – operating in the
country and not on local portals. Ghazal says that
Lebanon’s very social culture, coupled with low
budgets online, has MBUs and agencies still directing clients toward Facebook and Google. He adds:
“If you have $50,000, you can include all websites
and social media, and have a standout 360-degree
campaign. But when the budgets are approximately
between $10,000 to $15,000, and you want to have a
good share of voice to be visible on the top ranking
websites, then you won’t have any budget left for
social media.” Karim Saikali, founder and CEO of
E-comLebanon.com and BuyLebanese.com, says
that local clients have been spending seasonally
on online and many times managing their own accounts, resulting in basic media booking on social
media and Google placement. He estimates online
spending on Lebanese portals to total a modest $2
million a year, an amount, he says, that has drastically dropped since 2012.
Social constructs. “Most of the ads we do are
for Facebook and Google. Unless clients ask for
it, we don’t do third-party publishers,” explains
Fadi Sabbagha, CEO and founder at Born Interactive. “It’s not wrong, because [social networks]
are performing better than local sites, in terms of
ROI, reach and targeting, so there is a lack on that
front from local sites. You cannot blame the client,”
adds Ghazal. And Kahaleh points out: “I wouldn’t
exclude Facebook advertising from any campaign,
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© Getty Images
the lowest in the world; when you see print is five
times bigger than online media, there is something
wrong. When the budgets are this low, the interests
are not those of the brand, but those of the agencies.” Up until a few months ago, El Murr explains,
local media agencies had upped the Facebook click
from 60 cents to one dollar, while they bought it
for only three to four cents. “It’s not just about the
money, it’s about taking the easy way out. Clients
see they have 20,000 Facebook fans – usually that
is the KPI for their digital campaigns – and they are
happy,” he says, while Sabbagha adds: “Booking
creatively within the media scene comes down to
one major parameter, where they [agencies] make
the most money. They might book creatively, but
disregard some platforms for others that will give
them more [profit] percentage.”
not because it’s Facebook, but it’s the number one
website in terms of audience in Lebanon. That is
not the case in France, the UK or the US.”
As a publisher, Arz El Murr, CEO at Al Nashra
Media Group – which, encompassing ElMazad.com,
ElNashra.com and other affiliate portals, ranks among
the biggest online media groups in Lebanon – has
a very basic observation: “Ad spend in Lebanon is
The price is wrong. Of course, social media is
but one of the obstacles hindering the growth of
budgets on local portals. Simply put, Rteil says,
digital was sold cheap across the region in the first
place, which is a logical, but risky entry strategy to
reassure skeptical clients. Rabih Haber, managing
director behind research firm Statistics Lebanon
and founder of Lebanonfiles.com – one of the top
traffic-driving news sites in Lebanon – recalls asking
the late Antoine Choueiri, back in 2006, for advice
on monetizing his venture three years after he set
it up: “He advised me to shut it down. Two years
after, they [Choueiri Group] set up a digital department.” Today, that department, DMS, is trying to
devise premium packages combining both offline
and online, including, as per the agencies, one-plusone offers of one-day online banners per one-time
print ads. “Selling [online] for free means it has no
value. If it has no value, why would the client want
it anyway? I don’t know if that’s the strategy, but
I don’t think it’s working,” says El Murr. Taybah,
on the other hand, encourages such efforts, even if
they might be misconstrued as demeaning to digital.
“It translates to people that its [Choueiri Group’s]
online portfolio is not selling well, which is not true.
What they are doing is very smart – getting clients
to at least try. But you have some clients that still
refuse free banners,” he says.
For better or worse, media reps are trying to price
Lebanese sites attractive enough to lure advertisers
and lucrative enough to justify their investments into
portals; a challenging feat, and with some portals,
equals defeat. “A lot of big networks such as Net
Advantage and Choueiri Group tried to consolidate websites under their wings and standardize the
prices, but it was a no sale. El Nashra used to sell
for one dollar and $1.5 CPM, then it became ten
dollars. And they [portals] are starting to leave the
network one after the other. Now the groups had to
set these prices, because they wanted to guarantee a
certain return to the publishers and they had invested
some money into implementing the ad servers and
preparing them for CPM models,” says Ghazal.
Commenting on El Nashra’s breakup with Net
Advantage, El Arz simply admits: “It didn’t work.
When we took back our traffic, we started working
on two axes: agencies and clients. We started our
CPM at one dollar and increased it to three dollars.
We are barely selling 20 percent of our inventory;
for now, we will not increase the prices. We are
partly to blame [for low prices], we kind of control
the market – 50 percent of the Lebanese traffic.”
Unfit models. Saikali might just agree with El
Murr’s pricing strategy; his efforts to support local
portals have been deterred lately by some of them
The research gap: Just how accurate are third-party monitoring and analytics platforms in Lebanon?
“All third-party platforms are third-party platforms
for a reason,” says Omar Abou Ezzedine, deputy
general manager at Cleartag, on the accuracy
of the likes of Effective Measure and Ipsos in
ranking top portals in Lebanon. In fact, there
is a general lack of information on online in the
country. When Communicate Levant contacted
Ipsos for online numbers on Lebanon – ad
spend in particular – the research firm had none.
Ipsos’s “Top Line Report”, released in December
2012, provides basic information on gender,
geographical distribution and the age range
of top Lebanese portals’ audience, but only
based on the cookie panel – whereas the fusion
panel, applied on studies for other countries in
the region, includes websites non-scripted by
Ipsos. Meanwhile, commercial web traffic data
Alexa “only measures when someone downloads
it on its browser. It’s not there for everyone,”
says Rasha Rteil, digital strategist Levant and
senior exchange manager at Mindshare. For
more real-time analytics, agencies heavily rely
on Effective Measure, which introduced the
Lebanon panel back in March – meaning it
included international sites alongside local
ones – and tracks approximately 90 percent
of Lebanese portals. “There is no consolidation
[of information on local portals] and this is a
problem. We do need to cross check portals
and analyze their data,” says Charbel Kahaleh,
head of digital at Vertical Media Services. That
is, of course, what media planners are paid to
do. In fact, Karim Saikali, CEO and founder of
E-comLebanon.com and BuyLebanese.com,
says that in the absence of accurate information,
agencies can work on easy to sophisticated
tracking platforms upon clients’ requests. “None
of the monitoring platforms can you depend
on entirely, they give you general indication. It’s
the same when we look at Facebook as an
indication of the demographic breakdown of
the online population in Lebanon, knowing that
there are 20 to 30 percent of fake accounts,”
explains Jorj Ghazal, owner at digital buying
agency, Wink.
What agencies and MBUs cannot detect
easily, however, are the fake impressions resulting from portals exceeding normal auto-
refresh rates for their pages. “Every time you
go from one picture to another on Beiruting.
com, it posts back the whole page; because
for each post back they get money out of refreshing the banner on Google. I have figures
on a lot of media outlets recording more than
200,000 page views, out of playing it smart with
their content,” explains Fadi Sabbagha, CEO
and founder of Born Interactive. Azmi Taybah,
account executive at MEC, says: “You are allowed a certain refresh rate to see whether the
user is idle or not and to change the banner,
but there are websites that auto refresh every
20 seconds. Elnashra.com was kicked out of
Effective Measure for it.”
Effective Measure is indeed working on the
transparency of its data-tracking systems, conducting an industry audit “to ensure that tagging
is being used properly,” and “imposing a ban
on any publisher that has committed tagging
infringement for up to six months”. The platform’s
new guidelines include “one tag and one page
impression per page” and the elimination of
“robots”– virtual users created by a software.
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LIMITLESS? In the small Lebanese market, publishers might do well limiting their prices for unlimited impressions, rather than adopt the CPM model
Karim Saikali.
Founder and CEO of E-comLebanon.com
and BuyLebanese.com
Rabih Haber.
Managing director at Statistics Lebanon and
founder of Lebanonfiles.com
Omar Abou Ezzedine.
Deputy general manager at Cleartag
doubling their prices in 2012 to the point that “we’re
at least ten times more expensive than Facebook”.
But, more importantly, he is not even sure if Lebanon
can afford a CPM model, as inventories are rarely,
if ever, sold out. “True, they [portals] need money
to invest in their platforms. But if you charge low
prices, or on unlimited impressions and get good
feedback, then in the long run you will get a lot of
ads on board,” he adds. Even Haber, whose portal
is officially represented by Net Advantage, says
only a country such as Egypt can sell by impressions; and his site is sticking to the monthly fixed
ads model. “Annahar is expensive, El Nashra is
expensive. LebanonFiles.com is the cheapest – not
that I think we are fairly priced compared to the
region. When you sell by impressions in a country
such as Lebanon, it’s expensive. Still, our ad spend
has grown dramatically,” says Haber.
Beiruting’s Lamah has grown a reputation in
the market for positioning his portal as niche, with
niche prices. Contrarily to Saikali, he believes that
the CPM model works for Lebanon, penalizing
smaller websites and rewarding popular ones, such
as his; because if a price comparison were to be
drawn on a local campaign’s monthly costs, his
portal would come out overpriced. Beiruting.com
started with monthly fixed ads and then moved on
to a CPM model, “first for five dollars, then for ten
dollars, then $12, and then we started adding based
on types of banners. A head banner costs $20.”
Some pricier operations on Beiruting.com include
the $400 per day skin, where the ad overtakes the
background of the site.
performance and reach of their campaigns. “Up
until a few months ago, we’d get an excel report
with impressions, clicks and CTR (click through
rate). Sometimes they [publishers] would refuse
to let us put codes to track, or tag their sites. But
they had to keep up with the accurate analytics of
social media,” he says.
“Some publishers will come and talk to you
about their impressions for a given category. These
are givens. What is the added value?,” asks Rteil.
“Unfortunately, portals don’t have detailed studies
on the types of audiences they have. They have
basic studies such as male/female; are not in-depth,
or marketing-related (ie income),” says Kahaleh.
Surely, clients are no longer impressionable,
and impressions are no longer impressive. But
offline metrics are not any better. “What can you
give other than male/female demographics? We
are a research company and can conduct a survey
and give the results to the agency, and then what?
Does LBC have a better measurement tool other
than the people meter?” asks Haber, adding that
portals such as Google Analytics and Effective
Measure give out accurate information about the
sites’ audiences through their own surveys.
“Agencies are not looking for reach and numbers
and what makes money for them. We are giving them
access to our ad servers; other websites are [doing
the same] as well. But if they do not let clients in
on our data, they cannot recommend or ask for us.
That being said, we are among the websites being
recommended by agencies,” says Hisham Ashkar,
general manager at El Nashra Media Group.
Impress me. The CPM model has pushed for more
transparency, as Ghazal says the implementation of
ad servers to serve this model has enabled agencies
and clients to obtain detailed information on the
Strategize much? Besides, Kahaleh says agencies
normally “just know” from previous experience
and ad serving about local portals that bring in the
numbers and their audience too; Lebanon’s top
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ranking websites are, by majority, news portals
that are mostly politically affiliated. “Lebanon is
built on politics, it happens that portals with the
highest audience are political forums and news
sites. As a media agency, our job is to do media
planning, not base the decision on the content
– whether political or not – especially if we are
working on a mass campaign,” he explains. There
aren’t enough traffic-driving websites within each
industry (such as news, lifestyle and entertainment), says Ghazal, so much so that most media
booking will pour into the same portals.
“When you are targeting Lebanese platforms,
you’re going mass. You can’t expect niche surgical
targeting,” says Omar Abou Ezzedine, deputy GM
at Cleartag, adding that Cleartag has developed
in-house live dashboard tools for feeding clients
with real-time analytics.
In fact, research and data inaccuracy aside (see
side box page 21), the scarcity of local top websites
has the media agencies working by one rule of
thumb in strategizing online, much like they have for
offline: for awareness and reach, book on all news
portals, or else exclude the politicized ones for
political correctness. “It is not a shot in the dark,”
says Rteil, “but some clients come in wanting big
awareness with political tendencies. And they just
want to see the ad, they don’t believe much in
targeting. We are taking baby steps with clients,
because you don’t want to be blamed for something
you didn’t promise.”
In fact, Ghazal recently faced this conundrum,
when a real estate client with an online budget of
more than $100,000 requested to be on Tayyar.org
and realestate.com.lb, because he wanted to “pay
back a favor” to some of his loyal clientele. “A
lot of them are not performing and not necessarily
for his campaign,” he says. Taybah adds: “Most
clients don’t want to be on political websites. Certain ones that are politically affiliated do spend on
their respective parties. Our recommendation is you
either spend on all of them, or on none of them.”
Besides, he says that although in a recent effort to
target niche customers MEC went for only highend online newspapers for a Nescafé campaign,
“at this point, any spend online is good spend”.
Technically speaking. Elie Bassil, head of social media at Cleartag, says Lebanon is witnessing
a democratization of platforms and cultures, and
“the niche audience in the country is really getting reduced. There is a target audience that differs
from one platform to another, but the biggest portals
target the masses. There is even a democratization
of luxury, so there is no longer a luxury niche product to go on a niche platform.” Nowhere is this
trend more evident than in a simple exercise on
Effective Measure; a look at the destination URLs
from ElNashra.com – the portals to which unique
browsers are heading after visiting the site – shows
its audience moves across opposing news sites to
read all sides of one breaking news story.
This means that to raise their qualitative value,
local portals can no longer solely rely on target
audience. They will need to offer more creative and
© Getty Images
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Cover Story | SEPTEMBER 2013
waste management. Clients want their money's worth, provided they don't waste it themselves
technical solutions to get more budgets on board.
“We actually have to create the solutions. The whole
concept of integration to campaigns is lagging,
because it is literally about the technicality of it.
Sometimes we have to build our own platforms and
social media aggregation tools, Twitterfalls to be able
to do infographics,” says Abou Ezzedine, adding
that sophisticated online ad tools such as Yahoo's
re-targeting - changing the ad in real time based
on the user viewing it - are impossible in lebanon,
because “our infrastructure doesn’t allow for this.
Our IP addresses are all messed up”. Lamah says his
portal has come up with creative solutions, such as
overlays, but agencies need to be more innovative
and let go of their offline mindset. “One example
of this is Heineken’s ‘Light up Christmas’, which
was activated on Beiruting.com. At the time, it
amounted to $5,000, pretty costly,” he says.
However, media agencies are trying to explore
new types of banners, such as widgets, that are
based on HTML5, whereby users can swipe content
and see videos, says Bassil. But, for now, they are
still in Beta form and could be too costly for the
local market. Meanwhile, Sabbagha believes that
the lack in creative effort from the agency’s side
comes from a lack in technical capacity from the
supplier’s side. “When [suppliers] send you the
specs sheet for a campaign, they tell you that the
ad should be 40K [size specs]. To handle all of
those creative formats, 40K [is not enough]. This
kills the ad,” he says. El Murr, however, assures:
“We’re technically ready for almost anything as
long as it does not compromise our brand. But the
clients need to be ready for banners in the first place.”
Give and take. El Murr’s statement, in fact, is not
baseless. Local clients seem to have understood the
CPM and CTR of online campaigns, but not the
basic ABCs, which include solid development for
their own landing pages and websites. Saikali says:
“Placing a banner online is only 20 to 30 percent of
the whole work. There is a lot of work involved as
far as the artwork and landing page are concerned.
And, unfortunately, you have some agencies treating
online just like offline. If you take a look at the visuals, it is as though they are replicas of billboards.”
Fortunately, other agencies have been voicing
out this concern to clients, knowing that if high
bounce-back rates follow high CTRs, they would
be blamed. “We see a lot of client websites, where
if you right-click to see the back end – the cached
page of the website – all you see is ‘untitled.
jpeg’ and the whole website would be an html
file. It means that no matter what we do and how
much they spend on search, they will never reach
anywhere, unless they change the whole website.
Search, after all, is a pointing system on relevance
through keywords and tags,” says Taybah, adding
that $3,000 to $4,000 spent reshuffling a website
would eventually save hundreds of thousands of
dollars in waste advertising. By default, most of
the work that Rteil’s team do online is on search,
display and mobile advertising, creating and reshuffling client platforms where necessary. “At
the end of the day, the core metrics are for users
to click [on ads]. If they click, where are they
going to go?” she says.
Should publishers invest in their platforms,
they would need more money and support from
advertisers. And should advertisers optimize their
platforms, they would need to spend less on search
and display advertising. Either way, agencies will
have to convince clients to spend more on local
portals and, if they succeed, sacrifice some profit margins on social media, search and display
advertising. After all, it should be a matter of mutual
funds and interests.
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