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Dubai: As more people spend their time online and urbanisation accelerates, internet and outdoor communications are growing increasingly popular, thus threatening to eat into the share of the traditional media's advertising market, an expert said on Wednesday.
Speaking on the second day of the Dubai Lynx International Advertising Festival, David McEvoy, marketing director of JCDecaux, said outdoor and internet media are gaining bigger audiences worldwide and are forecast to continue growing.
He said consumers now spend 20 per cent of their time on the internet, thus creating opportunities for online advertising.
The rise of the internet was highlighted during the Consumer Electronics Show last year when Microsoft's Bill Gates announced that online viewers will have access to 3,600 hours of live coverage of the Beijing Olympics on Microsoft Network.
McEvoy said there has also been an increase in people's mobility, with a majority of consumers spending 51 per cent of their time outside their homes - a trend that is a boon to outdoor communications.
The trend is likely to grow further, as 60 per cent of the world's population is expected to be living in major urban centres by 2030.
"This is the new environment we're living in. The internet will grow six times faster than traditional media, capturing six to nine per cent of the ad market. And all of the fastest growing ad markets will be in the Middle East and the Central and Eastern Europe."
"So, you've got the internet which is taking time from traditional media and you've got people who are now spending more time out of home."
Bander Asiri, managing director of Al Khaleejiah Advertising and Public Relations, said it is inevitable that online advertising will become more established, especially in a tech-savvy market like the Middle East, but the role of traditional media outlets "is still very much intact."
Opportunity
"Online expansion represents an opportunity, not a threat to established news outlets. The key challenge will be to harness the equity of famous offline titles in digital space. Web-based and traditional media complement each other, and the potential in the Middle East for publishers and advertisers alike is greater than ever," said Asiri.
To rise to the challenge posed by the growing outdoor and internet media, McEvoy urged the creative community to be "more engaging" in order to effectively promote brands.
"In today's age, you have to be more engaging. You have to engage in new technology because the internet is starting to force that type of engagement upon us," McEvoy said.
And for outdoor media, he said the challenge for creative thinkers is to get to the essence of the brand and get the message across simply and quickly.
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