In the past year, the development of digital marketing took some exciting new turns, reaching not only new levels of growth and penetration, but also new levels of sophistication. Marketers who started with websites, banner ads and email now have an increasingly wide choice of platforms on which to engage their target customers. Search, social media, blogs, sponsored content, mobile, email, and gaming all offer opportunities for innovation and differentiation online.
Online media is increasingly gaining the trust of Asian consumers. A recent TNS survey revealed that of the top 25 most trusted forms of media, 14 were online. And increasingly, trusted online media includes user-generated content. The third most trusted overall are expert product reviews from websites, with consumer product reviews from websites at #5 and consumer opinions on blogs and message boards at #7 and #12 respectively.
In the early days of digital marketing, offline advertising was used as the model: interruptive messages were placed in front of (or disrupted) the content in ways that grabbed the user's attention. Now we're seeing a truly interactive model arise, in which brands engage their consumers online, either by joining the conversation, or creating a platform for a community to gather around the brand. Some of this new online communication looks more like PR than advertising, and clearly the lines are blurring between sales promotion, CRM and brand-building. Whatever it will eventually develop into, it's exciting.
It's clear that Internet users have adopted new media faster than most advertisers trying to reach them. Advertisers need to do some catching up. Although there are some definitive case studies that demonstrate the power of using social media, the ADMA 2009 Survey of the region's advertisers, marketers and agencies uncovered that most marketers and advertisers still predominantly use websites, online ads and email. Why these relatively conservative approaches when the Internet changes continuously and offers so many opportunities for innovation? In some cases, advertisers may be concerned about the relative lack of control over their messaging and positioning on social media platforms, and in other cases they may not yet have discovered a credible way to connect with their target customers online.
In any event, there is no doubt that 2009 is the year of social media. Social media platforms have not figured out a way to make money from the huge communities they have created online, but even brands with no clear social media strategy know that they must engage by joining networks and conversations. Facebook, Twitter, Friendster, Bebo, MySpace and LinkedIn have built large-scale user bases in Asia Pacific but these global players don't dominate in every market. New patterns of usage and local behaviour are emerging across the region, with clear distinctions from country to country where consumers spend time online, and how they behave. For example, 48% of all South Koreans have a Cyworld account, and the site has nearly 18 million users, of whom 30% are in their 20s. China's 51.com has 14 million average weekly unique browsers, and 150 million Qzone users actively update their accounts at least once a month. In the Philippines more than 74% of the online population participates in social networking; Friendster has 10.7 million subscribers and Facebook has more than one million.
The imperative for marketers now is to join these networks and interact directly with their communities of customers online. Rich media, banner ads, pop-up ads, sponsored content and search may continue to command the lion's share of online ad dollars, but brands must now master the art of connecting with consumers, as well as -- or in many cases instead of -- interrupting their online experience with advertising messages. Two years ago, the big news in digital marketing was the scale of the opportunity, as the number of users in Asia surpassed all other regions for the first time. Last year the dominant theme was putting the consumer back at the centre of the equation, as marketers and advertisers refocused on customers' profiles and needs, rather than the tools and technologies available to reach them. In 2009, the focus is on connecting brands and consumers, and deeply engaging with target audiences across a wide variety of platforms.
Gaming too can be considered part of the social media phenomenon: in a survey more than 50% of respondents said "meeting other gamers online" was important for their overall experience, and more than 60% of users said they also kept in touch with these friends on other social networking platforms. The numbers for online gaming are big and growing. Games.com attracts nearly 200,000 unique visitors a month in Asia Pacific, each of whom spends an average 86.8 minutes on the site, and QQ.com in China draws more than 44,000 visitors monthly, each spending an average of 46.5 minutes there.
Looking beyond social media, online advertising continues to become more mainstream and sophisticated, despite the recession. Yahoo! predicts Asia's annual online ad spend will eclipse western Europe's by 2010 to reach US$122 billion. According to the TNS survey, dedicated websites (53%), sponsored content (50%), pop-up ads (46%), banner ads (39%) and email (19%) are the most common types of digital edia seen being used in Asia. Online branding efforts appear to be paying off, with nearly a third of users saying that the brand advertising they have seen significantly increased their interest in using the brand in question.
China is number one in search, with 12.8 million searches performed in a month by nearly 150,000 searchers - that's 85 searches per searcher. Japan is the second largest search market, with 5.9 million searchers. However, Korea's searchers are most prolific, with 109 searches per searcher, Singapore not far behind with 106.
Mobile continues to gain, both as a text messaging and voice call channel, but also for Internet access. Asia Pacific (ex Japan) has 97.6 million mobile online gamers, and 50% of them are in in China. There is 60% mobile phone penetration in the Philippines. Filipinos send the highest number of SMS messages per subscriber in the world. Mobile site page views grew 1120% YOY. 2008 Asia Pacificwide mobile data revenues topped US$65 billion, and an estimated 473 million handsets were sold.
With usage of all elements of the online marketing mix growing and becoming more sophisticated, all the stakeholders in the digital marketing industry -- from marketers and advertisers to publishers, agencies, hardware and technology solutions providers -- have a unique opportunity in 2009 to pioneer new ways to engage consumers and build their brands and sales online.
By David Ketchum
Chairman, Asia Digital Marketing Association and CEO, Upstream Asia.
Digital Marketing Yearbook 2011