Trevor Johnson, head of strategy and planning for Facebook EMEA, announced Facebook's recent alliance with Connect Ads, who have been named the site's official representation partner in the region, at a press conference on Wednesday Facebook hopes that the deal with Connect Ads will give exposure to advertisers in a socially conservative Middle East region where online marketing is in its early stages and social media sites under threat at times from the service providers.
I had an offsite meeting in Marsa Alam, Egypt in 2008 where I met the Connect Ads team. It was a pleasure meeting Mohamed El Sayad GM – MSN Arabia and Amr Al-Masri who is an account executive at Connect Ads. Connect Ads makes an excellent team to work with. They were busy launching MSN Maghreb then and today they have managed to seize control of Facebook in the Middle East.
The Cairo-based advertising booker already handles sales for Microsoft Corp.’s MSN regional portals and other local sites namely MSN Arabia, MSN Maghreb, ArabFinance.com, Masrawy.com, Otlob.com, Yallabina.com, Mazika.com, CareerMidEast.com, YallaKora.com, Barca Arabia, and El3ab.com
There are about ten million active Facebook users in the Middle East and North Africa region, making up about 2.5% of the social networking site's total base of 400 million active users worldwide. United Arab Emirates has an average of 1.2 million Facebook users with more growth expected from the Middle East as a whole over the coming years.
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