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 Backlite Media has won a contract with Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority to knock up 30 new lamp post spots in the city.
The new positions will go up along Umm Suqeim Road, from its interchange with Sheikh Zayed Road all the way to Beach Road, opposite Souk Al Madinat.
“With this new tender win, we are very happy to add this stretch of lampposts to our existing lamppost business in Sheikh Zayed Road. This small stretch of road leads straight to Burj Al Arab and Souk Madinat. This will allow us to offer our clients further exposure on very prestigious locations within Dubai,” said Backlite MD James Bicknell in a press release.
This marks the latest in a series of wins for Backlite this year. In July the firm announced it had picked up rights to 10 new hoardings
on Sheikh Zayed Road, along with lamp posts on the main Dubai artery as well.
The outdoor ad firm’s chairman, Bengt Bendeus, added in the release: “We have chosen to be aggressive in our expansion policy this year as we believe Dubai will come back strongly in 2010. We want to be ready for this by having the very best outdoor advertising products to offer to potential clients. We will continue to look for other high quality opportunities to increase our portfolio as and when they arrive.”
We hope Bendeus and co are right about the recovery, but all this is still an awful lot of new hoardings in an already cluttered – and currently under-utilised – market...
UPDATE: 20 October 2009
We received a very polite email from James Bicknell, MD at Backlite, offering his thoughts on our above commentary.
Bicknell writes: "You are right that there are a lot of unsold advertising locations around this city. The majority of these sites are on second tier locations where this it too much supply and now during the downturn have proved very difficult to sell.
"We, on the other hand, have solely concentrated on keeping our business model to first class high traffic areas with high quality elegant advertising structures. Consequently this means that even now during this tough year we still have a very high occupancy level for our signs. The new locations on Umm Suqeim Street are also first class locations that once built will blend in well with the surrounding area and prove to be valuable additional advertising space for this city.
"We will also be building 10 new unipole signs along Sheikh Zayed Road within the next five months the same style as we have already on this road. From WTC to IC4 there will only be our one design available which will surely improve the look of this road and also control supply to further stabilise the market."
We're happy to acknowledge Bicknell's points here; if Backlite can maintain a high-quality portfolio – as opposed, say, to hoardings obscured by the Dubai Metro, new builds, etc – then it will no doubt find it easier to carve out its market.
However, our overall point still stands: the Dubai outdoor scene is cluttered, and while Backlite may well do OK, this will probably come at the expense of others, at least until the outdoor market shows robust growth again. This is, of course, the nature of free-market economics, so we're not going to shed too many tears, here.
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