Next Wave Marketing?

The mobile ad markets are ballooning?

Frost & Sullivan has forcasted in their Sept 2008 report that, Mobile Ad revenue would rise to S1.9 billion in US in 2008. According to its research, 85% of US population subscribes to mobile services. That translates to about 250 million mobile phone users. Gartner has forcasted earlier this year that, the Mobile Ad revenue should rocket to $11.8 billion worldwide in 3 years time (2011).

A study on these figures shows the potential of this emerging market. AdMob is still the leader in the mobile ad arena, but with heavyweight player joining the game, could AdMob hold on to its lead for long? One of these aggressive expansions is done by BuzzCity Pte. Ltd., little known company in the US, but has long and firm grip in the developing countries since 1999. Google, Nokia, and Yahoo are starting their campaign in the mobile world as well, especially after the introduction of the popular iPhone. However, US might be the big money spender in advertisement, we should focus in emerging potential markets which are having phenomenal growth in the mobile advertising world. One of them to keep an eye on is - Indonesia

80 million Indonesian, or 34% of the population has subscription to mobile phone services. The average per customer at Telkom cellphone unit is recorded at $8.40 for the first 6 months of 2007, with data services contributing 38% of its revenue. Telkom is the second largest South-East Asia mobile phone service provider. The plan to increase data, internet and multimedia services is timely as according to Indonesian Internet Service Provider Association statistics, the number of Indonesian to have access to internet services would rise 73% to 43 million users by year 2009. Indonesia has a population of 234 million people, and is deemed as the 3rd largest democratic country after US and India. With Hutchinson CP Telecommunications, a unit of Hong Kong Tycoon Li, Ka-Shing joining the Indonesia mobile services scene in mid 2007, we are forecasting that the rate of subscription would dive even further, making way for creative or flat data plans which will encourage further influx in this country mobile industry.

With the accelerating rate of mobile service adoption in developing countries, we will expect the influence of mobile networks to increase in the field of advertising and branding. Some brands would just want to have their footages in these communities instead of having high traffic to click on their advertisement. Nike, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Kraft, etc, all these household names would want to reach out to the households of these markets to expand their branding activities. We might be seeing the next wave of marketing taking shape within the short period of 3 years from now. I will take a more detail study into these markets in future entries, expect to see more articles on the study of US, India and Indonesia markets.