Perspective... Shedding light on Asians' media habits will remain a piecemeal process

Last week saw the launch of Synovate’s latest PAX data, following hard on the heels of Ipsos’ BE:Asia. Both surveys look at roughly the same thing - media and consumption habits of Asia’s affluent consumers.

Both are good as far as they go. They can be used to gauge the performance of regional media, and to build a profile of their audiences. And as one media agency source points out, they’re pretty cheap too.

But both reflect an increasingly outmoded view of Asian marketing: that advertisers’ primary concern is a relatively narrow band of consumers across the region. As our Off The Fence piece argues, the focus has now switched to local markets. Now advertisers need to know far more about media habits within individual markets.

The media data in many Asian countries is still painfully limited.

The sheer cost of data collection makes decent research hard in emerging markets. That said, progress is being made. In China, firms such as CSM and CTR are doing a good job lifting the veil on media habits, though there is still a long way to go (it is remarkable to think China will soon become the world’s third-biggest ad market regardless). And in Singapore, the new IAB has vowed to get some online research off the ground (online remains a research black hole across most of Asia). There are still ‘dark’ markets such as Vietnam, but generally a clearer picture is emerging.

So where can the industry go next? Media agencies have been developing their own tools, with a focus on cross-media planning. In Japan, this has been relatively easy for the big domestic agencies, as they have fingers in so many pies.

But could more be done at an industry level to provide advertisers with reliable cross-media data? In the West, there has been a push toward ‘single-source’ data. There was the ill-fated Project Apollo in the US, or the more successful Touchpoints study in the UK.

We’re a long way from that in Asia, but theoretically Hong Kong or Singapore would be ideal places to try this type of research. Both are small, making the research relatively easy to conduct. And they have wealthy populations who spend a lot of time online or in-store.

The question is where the impetus would come from. The IAB aside, there are few trade bodies driving the debate. The research agencies are limited in what they can do unless somebody stumps up the cash. There’s no consensus among media owners, who would typically be expected to contribute around 80 per cent of the funding for this sort of project. And the media agencies simply don’t have the resources to fund the remainder. As one senior media agency executive told me: “It should be me driving this. But nobody’s crying out for it.”

Despite the seismic changes in Asia’s consumer landscape, it seems media research will remain a piecemeal affair.

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This article was originally published in 22 October 2009 issue of Media.