Region's marketers grasping mobile opportunities

How big of an opportunity does mobile advertising represent in Asia-Pacific? 

Data from [mobile operator trade group] GSMA shows that Asia-Pacific accounts for half of the total mobile connections in the world, with over 3 billion subscribers from this region out of the total 6 billion globally. Analyst firm Gartner stated that in 2012, in the Asia-Pacific including Japan, mobile advertising revenue was expected to hit over US$4 billion. Gartner also predicts that by 2016, the mobile advertising industry is expected to grow beyond $9 billion in Asia-Pacific alone.

This presents growth opportunities for brands and agencies as they constantly innovate and use mobile to connect and engage with their target audiences. With the mobile device being the most personal medium to reach out to your customers and the growth of mobile in Asia-Pacific, we see huge growth potential for the industry, with many players coming in to offer various services and propositions.

Are Asian marketers doing enough to embrace mobile strategies?

Based on campaigns that Out There Media has executed in Asia in 2012, we are seeing a shift in marketing budgets being allocated to mobile media, with marketers embracing the power of mobile more and more, to fully integrate it as part of their broader marketing mix.

Mobile offers a great uplift to a marketing campaign, especially in reaching out to a larger audience. What we are seeing is that brands are increasingly using mobile to launch a location-based campaign or integrate mobile into a social-media campaign that they are running simultaneously—thus the growing trend of SoLoMo (social-local-mobile) in the region.

One example of how marketers are implementing such strategies is through a campaign we implemented in Malaysia for Unilever’s Sunsilk Savana range of products. Through this campaign, we collaborated with our agency partner in Malaysia, Mindshare, to execute a mobile campaign that would encourage engagement on the mobile website (mobisite). Due to the ability of the mobile platform to reach out to a targeted audience group who are most likely to be interested in the product, the campaign was successful in reaching women in rural and urban areas around the country.

What needs to be done to encourage more brands to embrace mobile strategy?

Educating the industry will be the key in elevating the standard of the mobile advertising industry. While we are beginning to see more brands recognising the power of the mobile channel as one of the most effective methods to reach out to target audiences, more can be done to educate marketers on the different ways they can execute mobile campaigns creatively and how that helps boost their ROI. More outstanding case studies have to be shared to highlight the effectiveness of mobile in helping brands build brand awareness, generate leads or even drive sales through the mobile campaign.

Mobile consumption trends are shaped by the evolution of mobile technology that we are seeing in the market today. The influx of technology like location-based services and even the increasing adoption of smartphones, have all impacted the way the market is shaping today.

The mobile channel inevitably becomes the most viable option for marketers to reach their target audience in the most effective way possible. It is the closest that brands can get to their consumers. Mobile advertising is all about creating a dialogue with consumers and engaging them in a more meaningful way. A part of being able to create this dialogue is moving beyond a “broadcast” model, where a single message or call to action is conveyed, to a one-on-one, "conversational” model.

It is interesting to note the emergence of new players in the mobile advertising space, ranging from publishers, networks, service providers and agencies.

Furthermore, the nature of messaging being quick and simple means that brands can instantaneously reach out to a large group of target audience. The trend of making advertisements a one-to-one dialogue can be seen not only in SMS advertising, but also in social marketing: personal engagement is a powerful tool.

What are some of your mobile predictions for this year?

A study by the Association of National Advertisers and media agency MediaVest stated that over 85 per cent of marketers globally have reported that they plan to increase their mobile advertising budgets in 2013. The study also shows that over 83 per cent of these marketers use mobile to build their brands, while another 78 per cent of those surveyed identified mobile as a great way of helping them create brand awareness.

While smartphone penetration will continue to grow in the West and more mature markets such as Singapore, Japan and Korea, SMS continues to reign in emerging markets. Gartner and Canalys note that feature phones still outsell smartphones, especially driven by emerging markets like Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam and Myanmar. Globally, Informa forecasts that SMS traffic will total 9.4 trillion messages by 2016, up from 5.9 trillion messages in 2011, and the technology will drive revenues of US$722.7 billion over the next five years.