Welcome to the 2008 Asia Digital Marketing Association (ADMA) Yearbook. Last year’s edition - the first one - was well received, so we’re back with the most up-to-date and freely available data on the online population in Asia Pacific, as well as insights and case studies. ADMA’s members span the full range of the digital marketing ecosystem, from portals and publishers, to advertisers, e-commerce platforms, device makers, games companies, agencies, technology solutions providers, and research houses. So we’re well positioned to provide a snapshot of what’s happening on the internet in Asia Pacific. Who’s online? How are they spending their time? How are marketers investing their budgets? What are the trends? No one source has all the answers, and we thank our contributors for sharing their research and company experience to help everyone in the industry.
Over the past year, the phenomenal growth in internet and mobile users has continued across the region. Increasingly, each market is developing distinct internet usage dynamics and market personalities beyond simply having different languages and cultures. For example, Indonesia’s online population has grown 900% since 2000, but still comprises only 8.5% of the total population. Australia, on the other hand, has virtually reached the saturation point, with 75.9% penetration - second only to Singapore’s 81.1% (the highest in the region and perhaps the world). Just 5.3% of India’s population is online, compared to the global average of 19.1%. China recently passed the United States as having the world’s largest population online, but still has massive expansion potential ahead with just 16% of its total population online. Hong Kong has the world’s highest mobile messenger usage, with 23% of global users.
The ways in which consumers and businesses use the internet is also becoming more diverse from country-to-country. Out of the universe of ways to use the internet - including email, instant messaging, RSS, SMS, search, gaming, video, podcasts, blogging, music, photos, social media, mobile - the mix and usage of the various online and mobile elements are distinctly different in the various markets, as well as among different demographic groups.
Here are some examples drawn from this data in this Yearbook. The Chinese have wholeheartedly embraced social networking, and 80% say being online is an essential part of how they live their lives. Hong Kong men spend more time online than they do watching television, but Hong Kong women are more likely to blog (21% vs. 14%) and to book travel online. Almost three quarters of Australian internet users shop online, and more than a third have booked overseas holidays. The Japanese are the only people in Asia Pacific to use the internet as one of their main sources of news.
In Singapore, 62% of online users play games, 59% listen to music, 53% communicate with others, and 49% watch videos. Whereas more than half of all Indian internet users go online mainly to send email, with searching for information a distant second at 20% of users. Google leads in search regionwide, except for in China, where Baidu’s enormous usage not only makes it top the list but also propels it into the top three search engines worldwide. And the Chinese and Indians lead the list of those most likely to pass on promotional emails, at 74% and 72% respectively of users saying that was the case.
2008 will be the year that marketers put consumers back at the centre of the digital marketing equation, where they belong. New technologies have been the heroes of the digital marketing story to date. New platforms, solutions and techniques are continuously coming onto the horizon, each generating excitement and opportunities as well as concerns about such issues as spam, security and privacy. Web sites, email, rich media, search, mobile, streaming video, and social networking have all had their moment in the sun. However, as the power of digital media and its technologies have grown, some marketers have lost sight of the fundamental skills of understanding and meeting consumer needs. Now more and more advertisers and agencies are rediscovering the obvious: “It's the customer, stupid”.
Marketers are becoming more sophisticated, and are starting to view tools such as mobile and social media not as new strategies in and of themselves, but as effective ways to reach target consumers as part of unified on- and offline marketing campaigns including print, TV and outdoor. Simultaneously, online publishers, mobile operators, and research houses are starting to offer real insight into distinct usage patterns in behaviour among men, women, youth, the wealthy and other demographic groups as each group reaches critical mass and the analytic tools become more powerful.
For all digital marketing’s strengths in tracking and measurement, end users must not be regarded as simply a pile of data points to be harvested, sorted and targeted.
The rise of social media has demonstrated conclusively that the consumer is in control of everything from choice of platform and device used, to creating the content. And consumers are fickle and not about to be dictated to by media owners or advertisers. Take search, for example. Asia Pacific has the world’s highest use of search (45% of the total) and search accounts for the majority of advertising revenue, but is initiated by the user, not the advertiser. In the Asia Pacific region, referrals from friends and family members continue to be the number one way that people learn about new Web sites and content. China has 42 million bloggers - more than the U.S. and Europe combined - and if the Chinese blogging community were a country, it would have a larger population than all of Argentina.
Keeping the consumer at the centre of marketing will also continue to drive online and mobile advertising spending. In Japan, now around 10% of all ad budgets are spent online, and mobile comprises around 10% of that. Online ad spend in Singapore should overtake traditional media spend after 2010. China’s online revenues are expected to top US$3 billion by 2010 - double 2007 levels. But these are all just projections - none of us really know what media the customers are going to adopt, how quickly trends will shift, how they’ll use media, and how credible new media will be as a marketing platform. Check out the 2009 ADMA Yearbook for an update!
The 2008 ADMA Yearbook is the product of hundreds of hours of work, and distilled from terabytes of data. I would like to thank everyone involved in its creation, including our members and contributors; the advertisers who made this expanded edition possible; our editor Rachel Oliver; and especially our cheerful and highly effective ADMA Director Kay Bayliss.
By David Ketchum
Chairman, Asia Digital Marketing Association and CEO, Upstream Asia.