You may not have heard of Hills Advertising, but if you are a frequent traveller down Dubai’s Sheikh Zayed Road, then you’ll be more than familiar with the company’s product. Run by founder and chief executive Sami Al-Mufleh, Hills has grown to become by far the largest player in the UAE’s outdoor advertising industry, with what he says is an estimated 65 percent of the market. Despite only launching in 2003, the company has tied up with some of the city’s biggest entities, including the Roads and Transport Authority (RTA), Meraas Holding and Dubai World Central. The result? A mixture of locations for static banner advertising that have been hard for Hills’ peer firms to compete with. So it’s not surprising to find that Al-Mufleh, a 44-year-old Jordanian, has so much to say. A 30-minute interview with the man that refers to himself and his workforce as “innovation engineers” ends up going well over the hour mark. And, as he says, the firm is still just getting into its stride. “Dubai has given us the opportunity to do things in a proper way,” he says. “It’s given us space to innovate. You can’t find such a country and such a city where you can do what we’ve done, with the support that we have had from the top entities.” While Al-Mufleh declines to discuss exact revenue figures for last year, it’s clear that the advertising sector is growing fast in the UAE. In 2013, total ad spend rose by 5 percent to reach $1.65bn in the country, according to the Pan Arab Studies & Research Company (PARC). Of that sum, 14 percent was spent on outdoor advertising, with by far the largest share (71 percent) still being invested in print. All that growth comes at a time when the outdoor advertising industry is seeing strong growth on the back of a switch to more digital forms of media. According to Kantar Media, a US-based research firm, outdoor advertising spend in the world’s biggest market rose by 4.4 percent in 2013. The major driver for that, the agency said, was that the digital signage gave operators far more flexibility when purchasing space, allowing them to get a higher price. Kantar also pointed out that over the last four years digital outdoor ad spend has risen five times faster than the industry as a whole. On the back of those numbers, Hills chose 2013 as the year to invest. In the last year alone, it spent AED150m ($41m) on buying advertising space in three major locations in Dubai. “Last year, I invested heavily in the company and the city,” Al-Mufleh says.“I didn’t take anything from the company personally; I come from a rich family and I believe in what we have. Everybody’s happy, I’m happy – let’s invest in the industry.” The highest sum, AED100m, was spent on renewing the company’s contract with the RTA, which will ensure that it has rights to sell advertising space on all of the emirate’s key road arteries, including Sheikh Zayed Road, Al Khail Road, and Sheikh Mohammed Bin Zayed Road for ten years. With daily traffic on Sheikh Zayed Road estimated at around 450,000 vehicles per day, it’s clearly a potential gold mine for advertisers. Combine that with Dubai’s resurgent economy, which has brought the city’s biggest developers back into the advertising market, and that AED100m contract starts to look like a decent piece of business. In total, Hills has spent AED400m on buying advertising space from the RTA, and has won 18 tenders from the government. The company has the rights to sell advertising hoardings on 90 percent of Dubai’s bridges. “Sheikh Zayed Road is still the most expensive [for advertisers],” says Al-Mufleh. “But it’s not enough; I want multinationals that maybe even have a smaller budget to come to me, and I can still give them something to cover the entire city.” Hills’ second deal, which cost AED20m, was a ten-year contract with Dubai World Central to provide advertising space at what is set to become the world’s biggest airport, housed within a 14km by 10km masterplanned area. But the real game-changer, Al-Mufleh hopes, is at The Beach, a new project in Dubai’s Jumeirah Beach Residence. The area features an open-air cinema with a 20m by 15m screen and 70 retail and food and beverage outlets, all next to the waterline. “We did a concept for this site, which features new interactive and digital media, with 39 pieces of media in one place, which will interact with each other and worldwide,” Al-Mufleh says. “This will allow everyone in the world to see what’s going on in Dubai. You can compare it to the New Year’s Eve celebration in New York’s Times Square, which is seen all over the world. Now we’ve created the same hub here.” So how will the concept work? Alongside the usual static banners, the site will feature 36 wall-mounted screens – what Al-Mufleh refers to as “like a 47-inch iPad screen” – where visitors will be able to take photos, send e-cards, check their emails, confirm airline tickets and even charge their mobiles. “We wanted to think outside the box,” the Hills boss says. “The value is not only in communication, it also allows advertising agencies to see in real time, and with real figures, who is interacting with their media. We were developing static banners in the past, but decided to move to this new area of opportunity.” It’s not as easy as simply selling space on billboards, but bringing this kind of concept to Dubai, as opposed to more mature markets, is certainly possible. At both The Beach and in Dubai World Central, the Hills team will be making use of the latest technology, implementing fibre-optic cables and adding the infrastructure to provide wi-fi and 3G connectivity into the fabric of each unit as it is built. As Dubai builds up to host the World Expo in seven years’ time, the positioning of the DWC project means that Hills’ clients are likely to get maximum exposure.
