We’ve been hearing a fair bit about the growing digital scene in Vietnam , so the conference offered a good chance to talk to some of the players involved.
We’ll be covering online in Vietnam in more detail at a later date, but in a nutshell its market is following a similar path to China’s. The web is proving popular because, in a tightly controlled media market, it offers two things: a relatively uncontrolled means of communication and a new source of entertainment.
We’ll be covering online in Vietnam in more detail at a later date, but in a nutshell its market is following a similar path to China’s. The web is proving popular because, in a tightly controlled media market, it offers two things: a relatively uncontrolled means of communication and a new source of entertainment.
The internet café is still the main locus of internet consumption (cafés account for around 70 per cent of traffic) - and this is one of the biggest challenges for advertisers. The fact that multiple users share a single IP address at a café makes measuring them extremely hard. TNS has launched a survey to try to remedy this, but for the moment the internet is a bit of a black hole for advertisers wanting to know who will actually see their ads. Perhaps it’s no surprise that online adspend in Vietnam is just US$10 million a year.
It was a reminder of just how difficult it is to produce reliable media data in emerging markets - and just how dependent we become on the few things we do know (or think we know). Conversations I’ve had with several media executives recently touch on this point. At their heart is a simple question: how much are clients actually spending online? At this point, it’s easy to reach for one of several sources and read out confidently that it makes up around five per cent in Hong Kong or three per cent in Singapore. These statistics are regularly wheeled out (including by me) as proof that advertisers aren’t spending enough.
Those statistics are based on the amount companies pay to buy media. But increasingly what we’re seeing in digital is a focus on earned media (word-of-mouth and the like), or owned media (websites, online video, branded games, etc.). There’s definitely money in these - you only have to look at the amount of effort PR agencies are expending to reinvent themselves as social media experts to see that. Would any of this investment in non-paid media show up in the standard adspend stats? Apparently not. Clients might be spending more on digital without it registering in the ‘official’ data.
On one level this doesn’t really matter - even if the figure for Singapore is six per cent, not three, it’s still pitifully small and needs to be addressed.
But it is a sign of a growing challenge. How do researchers keep up with the dizzying array of marketing channels and the investment they require? And how do agencies and clients go about benchmarking their activity against industry norms when we don’t even know what those norms are any more?
It’s not just Vietnam that is facing a black hole.
Got a view?
Email David.tiltman@media.asia
This article was originally published in 3 December 2009 issue of Media.
