Three months since I moved to Singapore and one of the first questions I’m always asked is why I chose to move here? Some people ask why an experienced professional who has worked at what most would consider the leading edge of digital ad sales (ie in UK/Northern Europe) would choose to ply their trade in a seemingly less sophisticated market (ie in APAC). “Aren’t the eastern digital markets several years behind the west?” they ask.
The implication here is that I’ve entered some sort of ad tech Groundhog Day, where I’ll be teaching and advising a new breed of marketers but going over the same ground as I did when I first started in my career at the MediaMath London office.
The reality is not that simple. While the US and Europe may be more mature markets in terms of ad spend, the rate of change in terms of consumer adoption of technology has been much faster in Asia and it’s exhilarating to observe.
The region is at the forefront of mobile innovation. Driven primarily by slow speeds, broadband connections in Asia are low with only 6% compared to 26% in Europe and 15.5% in the Americas. The region therefore relies on mobile as its primary mode of communication. As a result, the number of mobile subscribers has outpaced the rest of the world over the past 10 years,according to the GSMA and is expected to reach 1.9 billion by 2017 which will account for almost half of the predicted global total of 3.9 billion. A recent report by Millward Brown showed that people in Asia who are multi-screen users consume 7 hours of screen media per day in a five hour period – the majority of which is on their smartphones.
The positive for the ad industry is that ad solutions and techniques have not had to make the generational leap from desktop and laptop to smartphone and tablet as they did in the west. Instead, they have been developed directly for mobile from the outset.
Vendors and technology players, are developing effective ad technology to target and track users across multiple channels and devices. Across the APAC region, major brands in the space are also providing a one-stop shop for a multi-channel, cost effective buys.
Yet, despite these advances in both consumer behaviour and the availability of ad technology to help drive more efficient media buys, there is a cultural reluctance to try new methods. The continuing dependency on cost per click (CPC) as the primary means of measuring performance campaigns is a good example of this. In Europe and the US, marketers are now far more aware of metrics such as cost per acquisition (CPA), Conversion Rate (CR) and Lifetime Value (LTV) to provide a much clearer view of their return on investment (ROI).
Greater use of attribution modelling and the uptake of the tools to enable it, will give marketers in the APAC region a huge advantage. The market is primed for effective multi-platform marketing. ‘Shifting’ between individual screens remains the dominant form of screen use in the region at 61% of screen time (Millward Brown). Whilst there’s no shortage of innovation in terms of actual mobile marketing campaigns (you’d be hard pressed to see any ad campaign that didn’t have a mobile element), the means of measuring campaign success lags behind.
In a multi device market like this, attribution and finding a good attribution partner is essential for marketers to understand where consumers are engaging with channels and devices. It is also important to understand how this engagement differs between individual consumers or target groups. Attribution isn’t simple. Very rarely is there a ‘one size fits all’ model. In more mature markets such as Europe and the US, marketers are still grappling with finding the best model to suit their individual needs. Finding a partner that can help identify the best performing channels (such as display, search, social and native ads) and how these differ across devices (such as smartphone, tablet, laptop or connected TVs) will give marketers in a market as diverse and mobile forward as APAC, a big advantage over their competition.
So when asked why I moved to Singapore, aside from the great weather and hospitable people, it’s pretty easy to answer ‘to stay ahead of the curve.’