Digital marketing in Asia Pacific in 2010 offers an almost infinite combination of ways to engage customers, participate in their communities, sell them products and services, and build brands and corporate reputations. Content can be highly personalised, relevant and localised deeply to take into account factors such as language, location, time of day, past behaviour and stated preferences. The range of available media is staggering, value-priced, and offers exceptional targeting. And this year the true "internet experience in the palm of your hand" is now available in many urban centres across the region, thanks to the spread of smartphones, 3G networks, and the applications that run on them.
There is a battle of epic proportions going on to determine which platforms will host the majority of online users' activities. The days when a portal was a web user's main access point to the internet are long over, but it's not yet clear what will take its place. Will the future be driven by search? Social networking? Mobilility? A device? An application? A browser? Microblogging? Google, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Skype and Yahoo! are just a few of the international players experimenting with different mixtures of applications, content and devices in their quest to be dominant. And in Asia Pacific, some world-class companies are looking to meet local needs or expand globally, such as Alibaba, Rakuten, Livedoor, Orkut, Rediff, Sina, Baidu, Daum, Telstra and others. Of note: Tencent is now among the top five sites visited globally.
These developments are exciting and empowering for marketers, advertisers, and their agencies. The consolidation of major players in the global internet industry such as Google's purchase of DoubleClick and the Microsoft/Yahoo! search deal, offers scale, and unprecedented reach and frequency for online marketing. That's matched with localised innovation that is bubbling up and providing new, highly relevant opportunities for engagement. The reality is that no one platform is going to win the markret outright, and whether each competitor purports to be "open" or not, they all have the potential to overlap and underlie one another. To quote author David Weinberger's book title, the internet remains "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" rather than a monolithic, consistent entity, despite various companies' attempts. The iPhone (and now the iPad) and its apps-and-content ecosystem as helped blaze new trails in mobility, e-commerce and content. However, there are also plenty of other cutting edge devices (30% of the world's smartphone market is in Asia Pacific) and plenty of other platforms driving the trend.
Last year it seemed that social networking – and more particularly Facebook – might take over as the dominant "operating system" of the internet. Now it's clear there are multiple players. For example, people on Windows Mobile phones access Gmail. Someone is searching Baidu using a FireFox browser. A teenager is playing a Playfish game on Facebook. People are transferring money with Alipay. A YouTube video is streaming through a Yahoo! site. Someone is Skyping on an Apple laptop, while someone else is IM'ing on their Nokia. A Chinese teenager just connected with a friend on RenRen with a 163.com email address.
The platform companies continuously refine their revenue models and try to grab market share, which is healthy because their platforms interconnect and produce hundreds of thousands of customer touchpoints for marketers to engage. How marketers deploy these platforms and what campaign ideas will be most successful is far from universal and, as in past years we're seeing increasing diversity in consumer habits across the region.
Here's a look at some of the trends in Asia Pacific, and of course there is much more detail in each of the country sections of this Yearbook.
- Internet users in Asia Pacific spent more than 5.6 trillion minutes online in 2009, and bought US$7 billion in virtual goods.
- When it comes to making online purchases, Asians across the board listen closely to their friends. Nearly half (48%) of South Korean internet users said they had bought something in the past because it was either discussed or recommended by one of their online friends, as have 38.2% of Malaysians, 40.4% of Japanese, 42.2% of Vietnamese, 48.4% of Indonesian's and one third of Filipinos.
- Mobile shopping is taking hold of the region, with nearly eight out of 10 Asian mobile users engaging in some form of mobile shopping activity in the past year.
- The Koreans are the top shoppers, with 97% of internet users say they have shopped online.
- Indians spent the least amount of time online of any Asian nation, at 11 hours per month.
- 63% of Singaporeans online watch TV at the same time.
- Japan leads the pack with mobile social media – more than 75% of social network users only access the sites via their mobiles.
- The Filipinos lead the world in SMS, with two billion text messages sent every day.
- Hong Kong people take the instant message crown, spending twice as much time IM'ing as anyone else in the region.
- More than half the Asia Pacific region's online population is Chinese, but they are the least prolific users of search in Asia Pacific.
- Australians spend more time on social networking sitesthan anyone else in the world (seven hours a month) and 27% of all Australians blog.
Online advertising spending has rebounded, following recovery from the recession, and continues to grow. However, there is no consistent pattern across the region. In 2009, Japan's online ad revenue grew just 1.2% over 2008, but hit a milestone: more money was spent on online media than on newspaper advertising for the first time. In China in 2009, 16.69% of all ad spend was online. Contrast this statistic with the Philippines, where just 1% of total advertising expenditure is online and SMS reigns supreme. For reference, Singapore's percentage of online spending stands at approximately 6%.
Another trend to watch is the balance of paid, owned and earned media. Paid media such as rich media, display, search and sponsored content remain the dominant forms of online marketing expenditure. Companies and brands continue to trust the control over the media plan and the content that paid media offers.
Owned media such as corporate websites, brand websites and microsites have always been an important component of the online marketing mix. Now increasingly social media such as Facebook pages and Twitter feeds are being added to the mix (except in China, where they are blocked, and marketers use other similar services). These owned media feeds provide both controlled content distribution opportunities, as well as platforms for customer and community interaction.
The dynamics of earned media are different, when customers become the channel, and brands have no control of what is said or shared. However, when brands get positive word of mouth from earned media, it is credible and powerful. Earned media, and to some extent the social media aspects of owned media, have more in common with public relations than traditional advertising.
After we waded through terabytes of statistics on platform usage, media consumption, and broadband and mobile penetration in order to compile this Yearbook, it's easy to see why some marketers lose sight of their customers and become pre-occupied with the technology. Our hope at the Asia Digital Marketing Association is that this Yearbook helps you get beyond facts and figures, and provides you insights that will make you a better and more successful marketer.
At the end of the day, there really is no such thing as a digital strategy, just solid marketing strategies that happen to use digital channels. No one has a crystal ball into what devices, applications, web services, and sites tomorrow's customer will use, so stay engaged with your customer and flexibly follow the trends across multiple platforms.
David Ketchum is Chairman, Asia Digital Marketing Association
and President of Bite Communications, Asia Pacific.