Titled ‘Moments of Trust’, the campaign features an emotional TVC showcasing the figures people trust across various stages of life and the small moments such as learning to ride a bike, taking the school bus, or maneuvering a wheelchair, where trust is integral. The video intelligently intertwines these moments with the subtle presence of tires in all of them, reminding audiences the importance of having tires you can trust too.

Building on the brand’s central pillars of sustainability, safety and performance, the video includes an appearance from the Mankhool Park Volleyball Court, which was unveiled by Continental last year, made from 100% recycled Continental Tires.

The campaign centers around times where trust is primordial, a father teaching his son to ride a bicycle, or a child swinging on a tire in your backyard, or the time when people of determination whose ability to move relies on the right tires, or perhaps adventure-seekers such as car racers or mountain bikers whose safety is also related to their tires, and eventually the school bus that gets children to and from school.

The campaign goes live on Continental Middle East’s social media channels on January 6^th 2025, and will be supplemented by an influencer marketing campaign across the first half of the month.

You can view the video here.

According to the report , advertising expenditure on social media will grow 20 percent in 2019 to reach US$84bn, while advertisers’ combined expenditure on print, newspapers and magazines, is expected to fall 6 percent to US$69bn.

The report concludes that these findings will make social media the third-largest channel for advertising this year. “With a 13 percent share of global adspend, behind television (29 percent) and paid search (17 percent). Its growth is slowing as it matures, and is forecast at 17% in 2020 and 13% in 2021, when it will account for 16 percent of all global adspend,” said a statement.

“Social media advertising gives brands the opportunity to drive growth by using automated tools to optimise their campaigns for key business objectives,” said Matt James, Zenith’s Global Brand President in a statement to the press.

James added “By using first-party data from their own websites to identify potential customers on social media, brands can convert consumers who are already on the path to purchase and target look-a-like audiences more effectively.”

The US drives global adspend growth as Europe and Asia slow

The statement added that the US ad market is the source of nearly half of global adspend growth. Zenith said they expect the market  to contribute 48 percent of new ad dollars this year, and 46 percent between 2018 and 2021. 

According to the company, the main sources of this growth are digital brands and small businesses  “whose ad budgets have been unlocked by the targeting and localisation capabilities of online platforms.”

Zenith  said it has downgraded its forecasts for Europe as poor economic performance in key markets has eroded advertiser confidence. 

Meanwhile, adspend growth is also slowing in Asia Pacific, with 4.4 percent growth forecast for 2019, after 6.9 percent growth in 2018.

Global adspend growth steady at 4.3% to 4.4% a year

Overall, Zenith forecasts that global adspend will grow by 4.4 percent, the company said in the statement. This means it will reach US$640bn, down slightly from the 4.6 percent forecast made in June. 

They added that they expect growth to remain stable at 4.3 percent  in 2020 and 4.4 percent in 2021.

I’ve been using the Adblock Plus plugin on my Firefox browser (yes, I don’t use Chrome) since it released version one, years ago. I do have a few excluded websites like Facebook and popular news and community portals in order to keep an eye on the digital ad industry. However, I would definitely block all YouTube True View ads because the last thing that you want when you are watching a calming documentary about nature, trying to fall asleep, is to get startled by the loud music of a cheesy and Arabized TVC that is a crude spin-off of the older, Western concept it was copied from.
The Adblocker plugin blocks the ads and the best example of its effect on online businesses is Google’s ad revenue during the first three quarters of 2013. Google Adsense revenue, which since 2003 has constituted 98 percent of Google’s overall income, suddenly stagnated and even experi­enced a momentary decline. Only after the mass adoption of programmatic advertising in the global market – and the introduction of more product/technology innovations on Google’s part – did their revenues eventually stabilize.
If you run a quick Keyword Traffic Report on Google Adwords (on a global level) you will notice that the “adblock” keyword skyrocketed on Google Search starting from January 2013, as the statistic reveals. In Lebanon on the other hand, it was only in July of the same year that the same search trend was noticed. So if anyone asks you how long a certain (Western) technology needs to get widespread in Lebanon, you say three to six months.
The digital ad industry needs to evolve ASAP before risking losing all digital has achieved over the years. Luckily enough, the solution already exists, and it’s down to the digital agencies to educate and make their clients, publishers and peers aware of this soon-to-be problem and its solution. Shifting from traditional direct-buy display ads, to more user-friendly options that lack the intrusive and out-of-content nature of most ads online today is the solutions that can be adopted as follow:
1- By now, I would assume that most digital marketers have at least a conceptual idea about programmatic buying/advertising, so I’ll start with a scenario of how PA (programmatic advertising) can defy the ad blocker’s filters and, in some cases, mutually evolve in order to deliver ads that are not “in your face”, but are user opt-in – a method can also be developed into the ad blocker to ask the user (or learn from their online behavior) what type of content they’re interested in consuming, then, after all these “learnings”, the user gets to see a custom-made ad that directly references the person viewing it and reflects their online activity the past couple of days. This is the age of mass-connectivity and it’s about time everyone recognizes the value of data and how easy it is to mine and make use of nowadays. The better your data is, the better your server’s algorithms work, which leads to better optimization and re-marketing in the future. Extracting valuable data and insights, which previously required a costly market research survey, is very easy nowadays. Ad blocker devel­opers need to work hand in hand with the major programmatic trading desks, ad/media agencies and e-commerce giants, in order to fine-tune this programmatic process; only allowing selected ads to the right user without negatively affecting the $1+ billion digital ad industry.
2- Native advertising has been around for a while now, but the definition has been slightly changing over time. NA in its most basic form is something like advertorials, but nowadays it’s a lot more than that. Native ads, as the name suggests, are native to the overall content/website theme, which the ad appears on. Not only are most native ads served through trading desks, meaning you are applying strict audience selection filters via behavioral targeting and other advanced audience targeting methods, but native ads are designed in a way that ensures the layout, colors, fonts and ele­ment sizes are in-line with the background content of the article, website section and/or the overall website branding. Native ads have been found to achieve CTR (click-through rate) performance figures as high as 11 percent (normal display ban­ner average is 0.20 percent), which means that the potential user/customer had an enjoyable (or let’s say, less annoying) experience as opposed to traditional display ads. And it goes without saying that a happy customer is the customer who will buy your product and even advocate it.