*UPDATE at the bottom*

So Im back!

I’ve been back for a while but for one reason or another I didn’t start writing on the blog. Unfortunately, the first thing I did write was a result of the sad events that occurred last week, totally not as planned!

Anyway, now that I’m back lets get back to business -

I found this interesting (at least for me and others working in marketing in Kuwait) chart today in AlQabas, which shows the top 10 advertisers in Kuwait so far in 2007 -

I dont understand why they have “tourism & travel” as number 5 when its an industry and not a company, but Im also surprised about MTC being below the three banks, that Mitsubishi is there, and that KFC or Americana in general is not included!

Forza’s question in the comments section about McDonalds spending more than banks led me to some research and I found this, from Advertising Age -


(click on the chart for better viewing)

You will find the rest of the 100 in the the original pdf file of top 100 spenders on ads globally from the website.

Whats interesting is that globally, Citigroup are the largest financial institutions in spending for ads, and they come in 46th place globally, while our banks here take 3 of the top 4!

Another interesting thing in the report is the country breakdown of spending, this is how they have Kuwait -

This obviously cannot be correct! There is no way in hell that Little Caesar spent more than Gulf Bank or KFH in Kuwait!! Yum foods is basically KFC & Pizza Hut, not sure if they added them together or what.

To be honest Im not a big fan of the research company that did that PARC (their website doesnt seem to work), so Im not so sure how accurate that is, I would believe the newspaper one more, although neither chart goes into detail on whether its just newspaper spending on spending in general!