Portable potential: Mobiles and new media provide new avenues for marketing

Social networking and the rise of portable internet-friendly devices like tablets and smartphones are opening up new avenues for media and advertising. But the market remains far from saturated and has the advantage of a sizeable youth demographic: figures from the 2007 census put the median age at 22 years old, with 46.1% of the population under the age of 20.

Young Filipinos are avid users of both computers and the internet. According to a 2011 survey of people aged 16-24 in the world’s 15 fastest-growing youth markets by Euromonitor, a market research firm, Filipinos spend the most time using computers. Additionally, the survey found that 36% of Filipinos aged 16 to 60 access the internet daily through PCs, tablets and mobiles.

Results from a nationwide survey conducted by Synovate, a market research company, showed the internet’s advertising reach rose to 46% overall in 2010-11, up from 32% in 2007-08. “Internet as a medium has been growing across all regions, from the greater Manila area to Mindanao, and is affecting all age groups,” Carole Sarthou, the managing director of Synovate for the Philippines, told local media.

Indeed, one of the most successful advertising campaigns of 2011 was a viral ad placed by Coca-Cola on YouTube, which focused on overseas Filipino workers returning home to their families. Many in the industry saw the popularity of the ad, and its rapid spread online, as something of a watershed moment. For advertisers, all this could mean rethinking marketing strategies that have traditionally run to print, radio and TV.

NETWORKING & BLOGGING: Young Filipinos have aggressively embraced social networking. In a 2008 internet usage survey, the global media agency Universal McCann found that social networking was most intensively used in the Philippines compared with 28 other countries, with 83% of Filipinos surveyed declaring membership in a social network. A 2010 Microsoft Windows Live survey found that Filipinos spend more than an hour each day on social networks. Of these, Facebook is the most popular. Internet analytics firm Alexa ranked Facebook the most visited site in the Philippines in December 2011, followed by Google, YouTube, Yahoo!, Blogspot.com, Wikipedia and Twitter. Blog sites WordPress and Tumblr were also popular.

From the Alexa list, it is clear that blogging and micro-blogging are popular ways to spread information and opinion, and they could become a powerful tool for consumer marketing. Indeed, blogs have become such an integral part of the digital information landscape that Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia has been co-sponsoring the Philippine Blog Awards since 2007.

PHONING IN: In a country with some 100m mobile subscriptions as of 2010 – or 1065 subscriptions per 1000 people – it is no surprise that mobile phones are becoming an increasingly important platform for marketing. Standard mobiles can deliver advertising via texts, while the latest smartphones have practically all the advertising potential of a normal computer.

This represents a huge opportunity to make the mobile screen a personalised medium for reaching customers. In the advertising industry, this is considered a new form of out-of-home (OOH) advertising, which has traditionally comprised billboards and other types of advertising seen in public. Local telecoms firm Smart Communications is betting that web-enabled mobiles will soon be the most popular way of accessing the internet, especially for lower-income consumers. Taking advantage of this, Smart is planning to offer smartphones ranging in price from P5000 ($113) to P6000 ($136), bundled with P500 ($11.30) monthly plans.

SPEND: TV currently takes the biggest share of the ad budget, with only about 2% going to digital ads and less than 1% to mobile advertising. Despite these low numbers, many believe that the coming combination of ubiquitous smartphones with a large number of cost-conscious consumers means targeted mobile advertising in the form of digital OOH and internet ads is poised to take off, with some analysts anticipating that mobile advertising will be more effective than internet or traditional media ads at achieving targeted objectives.