Tunisia

adopt a European attitude of credit and consumption, making the market more attractive to marketers despite its struggling economy.

More network players have gradually been expanding into the market since the revolution. In 2013 both creative agency TBWA/Raad and media agency MediaCom opened Tunis offices. And last August, the holding company behind Lebanonbased outdoor supplier Pikasso bought 66.36 per cent of Maghreb International Publicité, the leading outdoor supplier in Tunisia. MIP has 1,200 faces across 10-squaremetre boards, unipoles and large-format ads in 54 cities, and 1,500 bus shelters in the Greater Tunis area.

Figures for advertising spend and media consumption in Tunisia are hard to come by. Neither regional media monitoring firm Ipsos nor media agency Zenith report spend figures. And Reporters Sans Frontiers’ Media Ownership Monitor reports that no reliable audience data exists for any type of media. It says: “Viable audience data serves as the currency in any healthy market as it determines advertising investment, and therefore financial sustainability. In addition, the impossibility of calculating audience shares hinders concentration control. If – as in Tunisia – audience data is missing, unavailable or even corrupted, the media market suffers as a whole.”

Economically and politically Tunisia is still far from stable. In June 2015, 38 people were shot dead in a terror attack near the town of Sousse, has affected the tourism sector. And in April and May of this year, protestors took to the streets in Tatouine, demanding employment and a share of the state’s hydrocarbons income. Weeks before those protests, The Arab Weekly reports Prime Minister Youssef Chahed was heckled by a woman who shouted: “Our young people have just two choices: drown in the sea or set themselves on fire.”

The country has a long way to come, but its advertising market is developing. It is just hard to tell how.