Advertising expected to grow by 20% in 2011

Twenty eight billion rupees were spent last year with telecoms industry taking the lead.

KARACHI: The Pakistani advertising industry is expected to grow by 20 per cent in 2011, which is higher than the global average, said Pakistan Advertisers Society (PAS) Chairman Aly Mustansir.

Speaking to The Express Tribune on Thursday, he said the local advertising industry had spent Rs28 billion in 2010, which marked a 460 per cent rise in expenditure compared to 10 years ago, when the industry used to allot a mere Rs4-5 billion for advertisements. This includes both print and electronic media.

The Pakistan Advertisers Society announced the launch of their first Advertising Awards 2011 to be held in May at a press conference at a local hotel here, where Mustansir was one of the key speakers.

“As the media expands and more channels and newspapers get introduced, the reach of advertisements also widens,” Mustansir said. He said that highest rise in advertisements had been from the telecom industry in Pakistan.

“50 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP) will shrink if advertisements are stopped - so their importance in the economy cannot be ignored,” he added. The PAS chairman said that in the past five to seven years, advertising has become so important that corporate firms have separate media planning departments to deal with them.

When asked whether PAS acts as a watchdog for the advertisements before they are aired, Mustansir replied that they have considered doing that, but haven’t got the resources to do so as yet. “We are aware that many organisations in the Middle East and other countries follow such practices and we are also studying them, but we haven’t got anything in the pipeline,” he stated.

He, however, said that PAS does keep a look out for advertisements that may be misleading or unethical, and then issues them a warning or asks the firm running the advertisement to discontinue them.

He said PAS takes ethical practices within the industry very seriously and one of their aim objectives is to see that as the industry expands, ethical practices are not compromised.

Referring to the Society’s aim of raising advertising standards in the country since they represent 80 per cent of the advertising expenditure of the country, he explained that advertising leads to healthy competition.

The PAS Advertisers Awards 2011 are being held in collaboration with the Advertisers Association of Pakistan. Chairman of the Awards Committee Fuad Chundrigar informed that there will be 26 categories in which campaigns will compete with each other within the category for creating the year’s most effective work.

Published in The Express Tribune, February 11^th, 2011.