Next year will see a world of mobiles, and Asia-Pacific will lead the way.
Asia-Pacific is the primary region of growth
An indication of how fast our region is growing can be seen from the latest quarterly earnings report — Asia saw 28% year-on-year growth in daily active people to 242 million and 21% growth in monthly active people to 426 million.
Over the past year, we’ve invested in programmes to help educate agencies and businesses on how they can leverage our platform to drive better returns. We have seen how brands and businesses, particularly in Thailand, are now able to run campaigns more efficiently and effectively on our platform and be able to reach targeted audience groups.
Asia-Pacific, a region made up of many different countries and cultures, is home to two-thirds of the world’s population and is also likely to be the region where the next 1 billion internet users will come on board. This is also a mobile-first region.
For many people in this part of the world, where feature phones are more prevalent than smartphones, their first internet experience is a social network experience.
This is especially true for Thailand, with more than 27 million people accessing Facebook each month, making it the ninth-largest country worldwide in terms of users.
Mobile engagement is deepening
Whether you are in Thailand or Indonesia, it is very likely you will see every person on the street holding or using a mobile phone. People are on mobiles all day, every day. Asia-Pacific is home to the largest mobile-phone market worldwide, with 2.6 billion users this year, and people will continue to come online via mobiles (eMarketer, April 2014).
Not only are people in Asia buying phones, they are heavily engaged with their devices. Across Asia, time spent on mobile devices has eclipsed TV, ranging from 44% of media time spend in Japan to 60% of media time spent in Thailand (Millward Brown AdReaction, March 2014).
The average person checks their mobile device 100 times a day (“Always Connected” report from IDC). This makes mobiles a crucially important channel for business and brands to connect with people, especially in Asia-Pacific.
Despite this clear opportunity for businesses, advertisers have not caught up. Today, mobile devices represent 20% of consumer media time, but that is still only 4% of overall ad spending (IAB US, March 2014).
Multiscreening
Marketers and businesses in Thailand must move quickly to take advantage of the various emerging trends in mobile-device use that are transforming the e-commerce landscape. Multiscreening, for instance, is gaining momentum all over the region. Some 81% of young people in Asia use their mobile devices while watching TV (“Coming of Age on Screens” from Crowd DNA, May 2014).
In Thailand, people spend more time on Facebook than on TV even during prime time (“Thais on Facebook” from TNS, 2014). This means TV is no longer able to provide the reach it once did, making it crucial to reach people on their devices even during prime time.
Growth in video is exploding, particularly on mobile devices
Meanwhile, the growth in video, particularly on mobile devices, is exploding. Video consumption on mobile phones and tablets has grown by 532% since 2012(eMarketer, July 2014). Two-thirds of video views on Facebook are happening on mobile devices. Since June of this year, there has been an average of more than 1 billion views on Facebook every day, while 76% of people who watch videos online say Facebook is their top source for video discovery. This fundamental shift in the way people consume videos content means there is a greater opportunity than ever for marketers to leverage a rich storytelling format in order to target people across devices and deepen engagement with them.
Marketers are increasingly focused on real business outcomes that are measurable
With more people spending more time across more devices, marketers are increasingly focused on measurable business outcomes. Likewise for Facebook, measurement effectiveness is an important priority, and our focus for 2015 is on advertisers getting real business results and measurement metrics on their campaigns on Facebook.
In addition to being where people spend their time, Facebook is the world’s largest network of real people. Facebook knows what individual people and their friends like, and we know we have real people across the devices. This enables us to show relevant ads, resulting in actual business results for marketers.
This year, we’ve introduced cross-device reporting for our ads, enabling advertisers to see for the first time how people are moving between devices before they convert. We already offer targeting, delivery and conversion measurement across devices, so with the new cross-device report, advertisers are now able to view privacy-safe reports about the devices on which people see ads and the devices on which conversions subsequently occur.
Here’s a great example of where targeted advertising and effective measurement has drawn success:
BagSpace, a Thai leather brand turned to Facebook to expand their business within Southeast Asia. They use Facebook’s measurement and targeted advertising tools reach new customers in a new country without exceeding their limited budget.
The result was a 10-fold return on ad spend within one month. Currently, they are looking to expand into other Asian countries by extending the reach to their core audience through Facebook.
Dan Neary is vice-president for Asia-Pacific at Facebook.