Trends Shaping The Market in Lebanon

In today’s series, we examine the competition among advertising agencies in Lebanon: the good, the bad and the ugly facts.

If you think the advertising business (especially digital) is lacking competition in Lebanon, you haven’t been paying attention. Our experts interviewed below all seem to agree on one thing: advertising agencies in Lebanon are engaged in a massive all-out price war!

In a time when many brands keep reducing overhead and cutting back on agency fees, it doesn’t always seem like they’re willing to cough up the dough. As it turns out -especially in this economy- small and medium businesses in Lebanon are reluctant to pay for unnecessary overhead or talent they don’t need. This creates an opportunity for smaller agencies and freelancers, sometimes at the expense of professionalism and creativity.

Today we interview some of Lebanon’s digital marketing experts on how they see competition among advertising agencies in Lebanon.

Mohammad Mortada ? LinkedIn Profile | Website

Sad. Just sad. The first thing a non-professional does is go into a price war, and drags the rest of the B-class agencies down with him. The reason behind this decision is usually impatience to score a client. You can see a vivid example on social media as commercial packages of $300/month that include a full-service. Of course, with such cheap packages come cheap quality that often destroys brands in the long run. Black tactics include buying fake followers and using automation software that often gets an account shadow-banned by the platform.

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Charbel Ghanime ? Linkedin Profile

Unfortunately, there has been an influx of what I like to call pseudo-agencies in the last several years. Many disgruntled employees have left their agencies to start their own small businesses, and there is a lack of transparency among all these small agencies and the big ones. Today, clients can get the same job done for $500 and $50,000. This is no longer competition, this is saturation and it’s bad for everyone. Eventually, I believe, pseudo-agencies will die out, healthy competition based on creative work will return, and prices in the market will begin to stabilize again as clients are beginning to wake up to the true cost of going with “cheap work” and how important it is to use creative work as the main metric rather than “cost”.

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Abdul Rahman Alieh ? Linkedin Profile

Last time I checked, there were over 70 social media agencies in Lebanon. This competition keeps everyone on their toes. There’s no margin of error. In order to survive, startups need to play aggressively and punch above their weight to gain recognition. But I’ve come to believe that as long as you’re offering something different, competition doesn’t matter as much. Offer something that your competitors are not.

So instead of scouring your competitors’ websites and social media pages to figure out what they’re doing, pay attention to what they’re NOT saying or doing instead, or at least communicate what you have in a different way. One thing seems certain though: In this age and time, agencies need more flexible staffing to cope with clients’ reduced spending and the ability to mesh seamlessly with the client’s teams (especially in F&B industry) as we do at SocialWeTalk. This will help them keep their costs at bay while maximizing clients’ returns.

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Stay tuned as we discover in the next series how our panel of digital marketing experts see clients expectations evolving.