MENA ready for change

Galvanised by political and social change, the Middle East’s media landscape is witnessing unprecedented developments driven, in part, by a surge in private investment and a revival in entrepreneurial spirit, Sarah Messer, Nielsen’s new director of media for MENAP, tells BroadcastPro ME

Settling into her new position at Nielsen, Messer, who has been with the firm in Dubai for just four months, enthuses about her move from the UK.

“The Middle East presents such an exciting opportunity. The Arab Spring has changed so much across the media landscape. The increasingly open media environment has brought greater freedoms — and accompanying challenges — for media that the region has never witnessed before. In addition, an estimated 50% of the population across the region is under the age of 25. This is a generation that has been stimulated to get online to play the role of social media commentators and empowered to use social media to their advantage by making informed choices and getting their ideas and opinions heard.”

Messer says the region offers numerous prospects for growth and innovation.

“The Middle East is still a developing market and is in very early stages, even in terms of research as there isn’t much data available. There is a real opportunity to work across the industry, across all television networks, print owners, radio, magazines, and online, to really help develop this market.”

Messer has worked with several media organisations, including the Financial Times and News Corporation. She spent the last six years at UK-based television network ITV, heading up the research department.

“My role typically was to sit in the middle of the business, interpret what the business information needs were, and what kind of research, information and data were needed to grow the business. Then, I would commission a project from someone such as Nielsen and eventually take the findings back internally and make them actionable around the department.”

She, however, switched sides from media owner to insights and research provider, which brought her to Nielsen.

Messer leads a new watch team that focuses on television, online and mobile. Their job is to provide clients with a comprehensive understanding of media consumption around the three screens.

“We’re working extensively with some of the TV networks here, such as Al Jazeera, Rotana Group and MBC,” she explains.

“One of the big projects we have been working on for the last year-and-a-half for a regional client set out to understand perceptions and consumption of broadcast news around the globe. As part of this project, Nielsen carried out nearly 100,000 interviews globally. In addition to conducting field work to make sure quality control and operations were in place, we also tapped into our global network of subject matter experts – some of whom had held senior executives posts at leading TV news networks – to interpret the collected data into meaningful analysis and actionable reports and recommendations.

“The end result enables clients to plan their strategy and think of which direction their business should take. It is never just about providing a huge collection of numbers – the hard part is making sense of it all and translating it into action.”

Another way of collecting data, in this region, according to Messer, is through a proprietary tool called BuzzMetrics. With this, Messer is able to provide real-time, authentic consumer expression in social media, enabling the delivery of deeper and more provocative consumer and marketing insights.

Although the data collected across the region is described as pan-Arab, when broken down into different countries, the size of the market and its varied channels differs significantly. To look at television as a whole in the region, and comment that it is growing, is a difficult statement to make, so Messer believes it is more accurate – and interesting – to look at the countries separately. Egypt, for example, has seen a surge of 33 new channels in just over a year.

“The more channels you have, the smaller the audiences get for some of the channels so, therefore, the harder it becomes to measure accurately,” explains Messer.

With numbers in the UK reaching eight million viewers for prime-time rival TV programmes, such as BBC’s Eastenders and ITV’s Coronation Street, although the viewing figures are high, it has to be compared to 15-20 years ago when there was a common choice of only four channels, and these programmes were receiving up to 27 million viewers each.

Messer says: “To really get transparency and accountability around measurement for TV, you must have people meters. For example, it is impossible for us to speak to every single person globally who has an interest in English language news, so we get as much existing information as possible. This can come from census data to understand the size of the population and its demographic breakdown, so then we start to understand how many people we have to speak to in different demographic groups to get a representative sample. When we have a representative sample, you can get an idea of the whole universe of people.”

Another area that is being explored is the three screens; how people in the MENA region are increasingly shifting (and often at the same time) between television, online and mobile, and how the interaction happens between the three. The UK is a technologically developed market with PVRs and online platforms such as BBC iPlayer and ITV Player having been available for a few years now, with 22-23% – a significant amount of time – of time-shifted viewing.

Messer says that due to time shifting, people are actually watching more television, but they are becoming clever with how they do it.

“People fit what they want to watch around their lives rather than being forced to watch it at a certain time. This is a dynamic which is still very new to the Arab world, where people are still mostly watching programmed television.”

She adds, however, that MBC, has taken a forward thinking step by launching a quality online platform in the guise of Shahid.net – a first for the region.

“MBC has some very interesting plans to bring as much content onto its online platform as possible. Such initiatives are emerging and the more they are promoted, the more people in this region will come into that world. Particularly in places such as Egypt with its growth of new channels, content is changing as well. Previously, availability of content was limited, but now we see greater levels of investment in soap operas, dramas and talk shows which are taking off with great enthusiasm. I predict that television viewing in this part of the world is on the increase.”

Another presented challenge is related to advertising. All of the television networks have only one or two satellites to broadcast across the whole region, so this causes problems due to different time zones.

“Peak time is different in different countries,” explains Messer, “so when one broadcast is coming down from one satellite, you can’t target the same audience across the whole region with the same efficiency, meaning advertisers can’t send their message as appropriately as they would hope to.”

One way some channels have gotten around this obstacle is by launching a parallel channel, providing the same content, but with a “+2 hour” timing shift, allowing viewers to tune in two hours later to view content they may have missed on the original broadcast. But satellite broadcast dynamics are also changing. During the next year, a number of new satellites will be launched so that different programmes can be aired at different times, allowing advertisers to become more clever with what they show and when.

On the other hand, legacy thinking regarding peak time is also being challenged as media and advertisers realise the tremendous impact of content in re-shaping this dynaamic.

Today, peak time planning is no longer all that matters to advertisers. Audiences are now increasingly following particular genres and shows across channels regardless of broadcast times.

In response, TV channels are beginning to take this into consideration and have started to benefit from this shift in viewership habits to expand their “peak” segment to include various slots during the day — no longer sticking to the old 4-5 hour time-band they called “peak time”. This may cause even more fragmentation in viewership but is also allowing many advertisers to minimise costs by focusing further on their core target audience.

“The landscape here is changing so quickly, it’s fascinating,” says Messer.