Advertisers in SE Asia yet to enter digital age
Advertisers in SE Asia yet to enter digital age
Deutsche Presse-Agentur, Bangkok
According to Bill Gates -- founder of Microsoft and arguably Harvard University's best known dropout -- the world is entering "the digital decade".
"This is the period of time when all our activities will take totally digital approaches," the Microsoft boss told a packed audience of employees and e-enthusiasts in Bangkok last month.
"Even though it was 30 years ago that I dropped out of Harvard University and talked about the first computer, we'll see more changes over the next 10 years than in all those 30," said Gates, predicting new digital revolutions in TV, cars, cellphones and of course computers that promise to change the way we do business, learn and play, again.
The message was no doubt lost on the 56 million Thais - 88 percent of the population - who do not have access to a computer or the Internet, but it may have sparked some SMS traffic among the country's 27 million -- 43 percent of the population -- cellphone owners.
In Southeast Asia, there remains a big digital divide between the haves and have nots, which is likely to slow Gates' "digital decade" down a decade or so.
Limited Internet access in Southeast Asia, and a perception that the majority of current users are teenagers playing games, has slowed the shift of advertising from traditional media such as TV, radio and print to the Internet.
Even in highly connected Singapore, ad spending on the Internet in 2004 only claimed about 0.8 percent of the total, according to Nielsen Media Research.
In the Philippines and Indonesia, advertising on the Internet has not even caused a blimp on the radar screen.
"In Indonesia access to the Internet is very low, the adoption of new technologies is very low and penetration of broadband is very low," said the head of one international advertising agency in Jakarta, who asked to remain anonymous. "Broadband is the key to all forms of advertising. If it's not there, the propensity for users to be savvy, high frequency is not there."
In Thailand, although Internet access is growing, advertisers and marketers are still lagging behind the trend, digital marketers say.
Part of the problem is the recent e-bust.
"If you look over the past five years, during the boom and then the bust and then the kind of quiet period that followed, Internet penetration only went one direction and that was straight up," said Kent Wertime, the Bangkok-based President of Asia for Ogilvy One, which specializes in one-to-one direct marketing.
"So there is this complete mismatch of what happened to Internet penetration and what happened on the stock market," said Wertime, explaining the sluggishness of e-advertising, or digital marketing.
In Thailand, where an estimated US$2 billion was spent on advertising in 2004, barely 0.5 percent went to Internet outlets such as portals, websites and search engines.
Another part of the problem is the lack of decent online content.
"Before you can take any of the users away from newspapers and other traditional media you need to have good website content," said Veerapongse Srivorakul, managing director of New Media Company, a Bangkok-based company dedicated to placing online advertisements.
"We only place ads where we feel there are readers, so without good content our business won't thrive," said Veerapongse.
Thailand's newspapers, whose advertising revenues shot up 33 percent last year to $433 million, have been slow to sink money into truly competitive websites with hourly updated news.
Their reluctance is perhaps understandable, given the slow takeoff for Internet advertising.
"It hasn't happened for a long time yet, not for the past ten years," said Pichai Chuensuksawadi, editor-in-chief of the Bangkok Post. "But we're not ignoring it. It's a future priority for the company but our goal is to make sure our product reaches the right target."
At least one Thai newspaper, Manager, has invested substantially in its online edition by hiring columnists and updating news hourly, and is started to get both readers and advertisements.
According to TrueHits.net, a government sponsored rating agency, manager.co.th has risen to fourth place among the 2,000 Thai online sites it monitors.
In July last year, the website started to solicit ads.
"The reaction I got from the agencies was - 'Are you mad? Who do you think you are? The New York Times?'" said Sathiphongse Lenavat, the Manager website's marketing manager.
But with a daily readership of more than 100,000, Sathiphongse said he has been able to persuade more marketers to use his website, where ad revenue has been growing at more than $24,400 a month since February this year.
One of the key elements of the Manager website's popularity has been its heavy emphasis on "entertainment news," or gossip columns on Bangkok's rich and famous.
Most users are accessing the Manager site during working hours on their office computers, another reminder that most Thais are still computerless.
Given the limited computer access, some digital marketers are aiming at the mobile phone market instead of the Internet, for now.
"When you look at the future of how you market you've got a number of options," said Wertime. "You've obviously got the Internet but you've also got the cellphone, which has much broader reach in Asia right now."