Shrinking Saudi middle class = long-term problem

'Shrinking Saudi middle class causes concern' says Gulf News.

The headline's a bit misleading for what's more of a feature/think-piece, but it should worry all those marketers and business people who are banking on an increasingly-prosperous KSA.

One of my working assumptions in recent years has generally been that Saudi Arabia can be relied on to be a) growing, b) growing at a reasonable clip thanks to its low starting-point, and c) growing despite most of the global turmoil, thanks to the oil revenues and the fundamental needs of 27-million-odd Saudis - the only market in the Gulf that's really real.

But if this is a faulty assumption...

Hmm.

Gaza and Israel - the PR front

When the US invaded Iraq the first time round (ie when it was invited to do so...), much was made of missile-mounted cameras and the transformation of the war into a very immediate media spectacle.

When the US invaded Iraq the SECOND time around, it took the "media war" concept even further, embedding journalists with specific units - and in a masterstroke of PR, matched up regional journos with their local divisions, thus ensuring plenty of positive grass-roots coverage for what was otherwise a deeply unpopular war just about everywhere.

When Israel invaded Lebanon in 2006, it didn't capitalise much on getting the media onside, and suffered on that front as a result.

Now, the story is very different.

This report from The National paints a picture of an Israel determined to control the war agenda on the internet, and bombarding global users with more information than they can process.

Its target is not the Middle East, but those otherwise disinterested observers in the US and Europe - if it can persuade them it is defending itself from attacks, rather than slaughtering innocent civilians, then that's another chunk of pressure off its back.

But this a PR game - so there's no incentive to tell the truth.

In one rather harrowing YouTube video, the IDF purports to show militants loading up a van with rockets. In eerie silence, the camera zooms in and out, before a strike is called in, leaving an expanding fireball where the van once was.

Unfortunately, they probably weren't rockets. According to Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, cited in The National, the men were almost certainly moving gas canisters, as they shifted a workshop out of a damaged site.

As is all too common in the media, though, whoever gets in first gets to call the tune - and right now that's Israel, as far as the PR war is concerned.

Palestinians, and many across the Middle East and around the world, are fighting back with images of the carnage, but as long as people believe Israel is defending itself against bad men with rockets and bombs, the sad truth is they will accept the carnage as "collateral damage".

And things like this editorial, denying the WWII holocaust, in Gulf News of all papers, really does not help. To the outside world, this gives an image of Israelis as merciless but justified defenders, and Arabs as irrational, illogical terrorist sympathisers - if not terrorists themselves.

Neither of these labels are correct - and neither is the reverse entirely the case either. But like it or not, the Arab world has to get a lot smarter at the PR game and target not the people who will sympathise anyway, but those who do not have strong opinions either way.

AdNation doesn't do politics, but we will be carrying a token of our support for the innocent casualties in Gaza on the site for now.

You think the Gulf has it bad?

Perspective is a wonderful thing. A newspaper in Turkey is losing advertisers, partly due to the economic downturn, but also due to fear of a shadowy, Mafia-like organisation that stands accused of engineering a vast, right-wing conspiracy across the country, according to this report in The National.

In comparison to assassination lists and political intrigue, suddenly the loss of some property advertising doesn't seem so bad.

The National is very good at these big, in-depth stories - which is why, again, it was rather a shame to see the paper tow the Abu Dhabi Is Fabulous line quite so blatantly.

At least it writes in English, though, as opposed to certain other papers, as a Dubai Media Observer commenter noted.

I believe one is publicly horse-whipped at the Daily Mail for that sort of Atrocity Against Language.

Financial Onanism

Headline spotted in Gulf News business section earlier this week: 'Whack off financial stress' and alongside it 'Relief options'.

Obviously GN staff are taking matters into their own hands.

[Cymbal crash]

(Thanks to N)

The weight of recession

Spot On's Alexander McNabb has been conducting an interesting experiment: weighing various issues of Gulf News, after discovering one was a little light in the hand.

His first post revealed GN had plunged almost 50% in weight, to a paltry 690g on 11 December. Surely this emaciated newspaper was a dire threat of the recession to come?

Happily, Gulf News is back up to a plumper 1.2kg today it seems. Recession over - back to the trough...