Today, 13 April 2022, the IAB GCC held the kickoff session for the second annual Digital Adspend survey. The survey aims to build on the successful ad market sizing for 2020 which was released in Q3 2021 and sized the MENA Digital Adspend at $3,6Bill. This year’s survey aims to increase the level of detail by including more participants from the IAB membership base across MENA to able to report a number of breakouts that the members have requested.  These include, but are not limited to:

• sub-regional splits (GCC, Levant, North Africa and MENA total)
• year-over-year growth rates
• social, video and programmatic breakouts
• identifying spending via third parties (agencies) vs direct

The IAB GCC has retained the same team that completed the 2020 survey and who is responsible for collating the IAB Europe Adspend surveys in order to maintain consistency of approach and to ensure global best practice is followed.  The methodology addresses the key issue many markets are struggling with – the lack of reported platform spends.  As Dr Daniel Knapp, Chief Economist for IAB Europe explains: “By including a mix of reported actuals, collaborative estimates, mathematical modelling and comparative benchmarks to come to an agreed industry figure, we are able to estimate the total market more accurately.”

The data collection and analysis phase will begin in April and run through end of May, allowing the team to ensure all relevant inputs are included and to align the release with IAB Europe Adspend releases in June.