Aug 5

Written by: marketing
Thursday, August 05, 2010 1:06 PM 

Source: adoimagazine, April 2010

A genuine watershed moment for the digital industry here in Asia then with the recently formed Singapore chapter of the IAB delivering the much awaited revenue report to an audience of digital’s finest this week. For the first time, we have audited, actual revenue numbers submitted by vendors, providing for the most accurately reported ad spend number anywhere in Asia.

The data shows an interactive market that has grown from around 3% to around 6% of overall ad spend in under three years in Singapore.  For 2008 this equated to a total spend of USD 36m, with H1 2009 delivering just over USD 20m, strong indication then of further growth in 2009 (the results for the annual 2009 are not released yet); and all this against a backdrop of overall advertising expenditure falling.

Whilst the report is restricted to Singapore revenue only, the numbers will resonate right across the APAC landscape. The co-operation between a handful of regional vendors like Aktiv and the international agency network is striving to deliver similar growth to the industry in all the geo-markets across Asia. The various reports out there have Hong Kong as the biggest SEA market, followed by Singapore and Malaysia.

At this stage, we can look to pitch the Singapore number against other metrics like overall ad spend and inventory availability within the other SEA markets to help get a clearer picture of where the market is at regionally. In Malaysia for example, Zenith reports an overall ad spend market that is 20% larger than Singapore, so equivalent online shares of overall ad spend for Malaysia would give an interactive market worth around USD 50m for the annual 2009.

The challenge of course is that extrapolating shares across territories like this is at best presumptive. Just another reason why this is an important step for the APAC interactive industry overall as we look to prove our performance to the world!