Digital Marketing in Asia Pacific

Twitter, in conjunction with its local Japanese partner DG Mobile looks to have launched a video service for Japanese Tweeters… TwitVideo. This service will allow users to upload and host video clips on Twitter that can be then tweeted.

As per Media.Asia this is quite a departure for Twitter, and is isolated to Japan. It appears the uniqueness of the Japanese market, has forced Twitter to adopt a different approach, and to also use as a bit of a testing ground for new services.

So… does this mean we’re likely to see this service extended to other markets?

I attended a Webinar focusing on utilising FaceBook for your business, and thought it was worth sharing. It’s very Australian centric but can easily be extended out to the rest of APAC. Quite a simple presentation with some useful tips, Do’s and Don’t's and good best-practice examples.

The webinar was coordinated and moderated by NETT, presented by Ogilvy and also features a case study by the Australian Business Women’s network. If you have not tapped into this medium of Social Networking yet, or have started but not given it the time it deserves, I suggest you take a few minutes to go through.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Singapore has outlined its future plans which include establishing working committees and hiring permanent staff. IAB plans to set up four working committees on research, training and education, events and marketing, and standards and guidelines. It hopes to be able to create guides for the industry, hold events and exhibitions, and create research, reports and white papers as well as potentially hold creative showcase awards show.

The Singapore chapter is established by a group of leading companies in the digital advertising sector. The IAB SEA Singapore’s goal will be to promote investment in interactive advertising, and it will seek to play a leading role in raising the profile, positive perception and growth of the industry in Singapore and throughout the region.

This is a positive development for the Singapore market – having a guideline for the interactive advertising medium. Makes a lot easier for advertisers and publishers to define a standardize format for the interactive medium.

It’s Australian Web Week this week… with a whole host of interesting events for anyone involved in the web. From pure geeks, to entrepreneurs to startup incubators… all are invited to join a number of social and professional gatherings.

Unfortunately, due to my full time job, I only have time to attend 1 evening event per day… so I’ve registered to go to:

Tuesday: Growth Town
Wednesday: Social Innovation Meetup (a time to gather and generate ideas for the camp in March)
Thursday: Ignite Sydney

But there are a lot more very cool and exciting events…

Are any of our readers going to any events in Sydney this week? We’d love to hear from you.

Tweet me on @hiconomics and let’s hook up.

It appears that Yahoo is spending some serious money to increase brand awareness in India…
The advert itself promotes the recently launched ‘Every You’ campaign, and is clearly an attempt by Yahoo! India to increase brand awareness in the English speaking marketplace.

Has anyone seen this campaign being promoted in other Asian markets?

Some interesting stats from Hitwise, shows an 18% increase on search traffic to Bing. Seems their advertising is working and certainly many of the curious are taking a look.  The key will be keeping the curious as regular searchers.  If the MSFT/Yahoo search deal goes through the combined traffic would be a reasonable 26%. While there was a minor decline on Google, still an astounding 70% of searches happen there. Just think about that, in the US where 89% of travelers search the internet for information 70% of them are starting with Google. I think it is safe to say that the reach of Google/Search far surpasses that of any advertising medium ever. Would be interesting to see some reliable numbers out of China and Japan as well as the rest of APAC.

I have been reading on augmented reality for a while now (guess Hichame has more experience in that). To date, most of the application have been in the US or Europe. I have yet to see any of the augmented reality apps that is specific to APAC…until today and I checked my iPhone App store for interesting application. Buuuk.com has just added augmented reality to their iPhone App…cool.

Buuuk.com is a Singapore company that provides location based restaurant information to the consumers on Andriod and iPhone. Once fire up the Buuuk application will be able to search for restaurants where they are located (using their GPS location aware feature), check out the offers available for Buuuk users (or credit card offers), check top rated restaurants and pubs,  submit reviews, etc. In addition, you  can also see the restaurants on the map, get direction to the restaurants, calculate distance as well as time it takes if you take a car, train or bus to the restaurant.

In the latest update to the application, Buuuk added in augmented reality to the application. In the list of restaurants displayed in your location, simply rotate your iPhone to landscape mode and the iPhone camera will turn on (I guess this is the same for Android – as I don’t own Android phone).  You can then follow the direction shown on your screen and walk to the restaurant – neat feature. Guess I will be spending the next few days walking with my iPhone camera on to test out the app. Check out the video below:

For more information, please click here

I suppose that it will take a bit of time to get used to the concept of augmented reality. Can already start to imagine the applications of augmented reality for marketing purposes and retailers making their offers available to companies like Buuuk to be included in their database (for an advertising fees of course). When you walk into a shopping mall with plenty of choices for restaurants, with a flick of the iPhone, you can see what offers is available and where. You can even fire up to see the menu and pricing before making your decision to walk into the restaurants…..just letting my imagination runs wild for now. I am sure retailers out there will have more creative uses for augmented reality.

Singapore – Women’s online magazine ShoppingLifestyle.com has announced a new ‘Cost per Open’ email marketing option which they hope will bring more traditional clients online (Click here to read the full article). This is definitely a departure from the business model whereby portal with huge database of end consumers “sell/lease” their customer database to client based on the number of e-mail address in their database.

For the advertiser, this model will definitely mean better return on investment on their email marketing spent. They will no longer be paying for the size of the database, but rather making payment based on the quality of the database (which is implied by the open rate of the database). Would this change the way database companies “rent” out their consumer database? I am not too sure, but definitely it will cause a stir within the industry. One thing for sure is that advertiser would be more attracted by the new financial model.

The model will also put more responsibilities back to their database owners to ensure that they “clean” up their database and ensure proper segmentation of user profile, getting the consumers to be more engage, etc. In addition, it will also be the interest of the database owners to “help” their client optimize their email marketing efforts so as to generate better “open-rate” for the email.

Would shoppinglifestyle.com set up a division to assist their client in their email marketing effort and to assist their client to optimize their email marketing campaign next?

Sprice.com

In my previous article “Mobile commerce is reshaping the way consumers plan, book and consume travel” about mobile apps re-shaping the way consumers plan and book travel and how most of the current apps are US-centric. Well, Sprice.com has just join the foray of travel service providers with their iPhone apps – “Sprice Hotels” – which is now available in the iPhone Apps store.

According to  Vikas Gulati, vice president of Sprice.com Asia Pacific – “The launch of our mobile application Sprice Hotels is a natural progression for our travel search engine as the pool of mobile users around the world to expand exponentially.” (Click here to see the full Article). It is definitely nice to see travel players in Asia Pacific starting to explore mobile application and generate income from the new mobile channel and I definitely look forward for more of such apps.

Excited, I picked up my iPhone immediately and fire up the App store to download Sprice Hotels to have a first hand experience of the App. First impression of the application is that the icon is a striking resemblance of the Hotels.com iPhone App – with a huge “H” representing Hotels.  The app also assumes that I want to book Singapore hotel (leveraging on iPhone location services) – which I am not.  Why do service provider assumes that I want last minute hotels in the location where I am at. There is a tab at the bottom of the screen to search hotel by destinations (which i tried). There seems to be no way where i can select my check-in/out date for the destination where i am going. The application automatically select a default date to return a search results. If I like a particular hotel offer, i can then click on it to select the check-in/out date to check availability for that hotel from a few of Sprice.com’s partners. Overall (in my opinion), a very clumsy experience when compared to other comparison search engine iPhone apps like Kayak.com. I would rate the application 2.5 out of 5 – Encouraging effort nevertheless. Certainly hope that Sprice.com would learn from initial experience and improve the service further to include flight search, store flight itinerary, etc (similar to WorldMate iPhone App).

Anyone tried to book their hotel using Sprice Hotels yet? Would certainly like your comments on that.

Are you one of the lucky people going to ad:tech Beijing in November? Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share? If yes, we’d love to hear from you.

At AsiaOnlineMarketing we are always looking for contributors to help grow our network across the Asia Pacific blogosphere. Unfortunately, none of the current members of AsiaOnlineMarketing will be able to visit Beijing for this years ad:tech (due to prior engagements). But if you are, we’d love to hear your thoughts and will give you a permanent login to contribute to our collaborative blog.

If you are interested, please send a Tweet to @asiaom_blog.