The Digital Ad Spend Paradox

We’re disappointed to see that Digital Media’s share of the advertising pie did not exceed 0.6% of the nett ad spend in Malaysia. We’re not expecting to be like Australia (13%) or even Japan (15%) and we’ve always known that it’ll be quite a few years yet until digital can compete with our mainstream cousins but a figure under 1% deserves some analysis.

Our medium has been steadily gaining in popularity amongst local and international brands and we’ve seen a string of successful social media campaigns from big brands targeted directly at the Malaysian Market, so why then does Cinema advertising (!) score better than Digital?!

Figures from Nielsens Malaysia Adex

Malaysia has high internet penetration

The natural conclusion is that Malaysians simply aren’t using the internet like they are in Japan or Australia. Look at India for example where Digital’s ad share stands at 0.2%. It is low but understandable – Internet penetration is microscopic there. Compare that to Malaysia where 62% have the internet which is even more surprising when we found that Australia, with over 10 times more spent on digital advertising has a similar internet penetration rate.

Or Maybe Malaysians arnt really using internet in the right way? 2008 figures show 66% of internet users are active in social networking, spending over 181 minutes each visit on Facebook – a huge number and second only to South Korea in Asia.

The Ad-spend Paradox

And so it seems we have a paradox. How on earth can two countries with near identical internet usage figures have radically different ad spends? It gets even more confusing when you throw Singapore into the equation. With 95% internet penetration and as one of the first countries in the world to digitize after pipe-lining cable broadband into people’s homes as early as 1999, digital still hardly makes a blip on the graph with a dismal 1.3% share.

The figures are incredibly inaccurate.

The answer lies in the figures themselves. According to Nielsen’s results (and the basis of this blog post), the total internet ad spend is calculated on a basket of locally-based websites and their advertising earnings. It goes without saying that the local internet scene here is no where as large as some other countries and our experience shows a lot of Malaysian advertisers would rather spend their dollars on globally based websites targeted at Malaysian users. This absolutely explains the 0.6%, but also proves how inaccurate these results actually are and highlights a much deeper issue.

There’s just nowhere to advertise.

Malaysians simply don’t spend enough time on local based portals to justify the ad spend. The table below shows how bad the problem is. Advertisers are spoiled for choice in Japan & Australia whilst Malaysia only manages to muster one single local site in the top 15 (the other two are the Google default and a local bank).

A fragmented scene

The underground and word-of-mouth nature of Malaysia’s news and opinions has driven the ‘local scene’ to become incredibly fragmented with people relying on differing sources for information, namely blogs, rather than consolidators like news websites. In London if I wanted to catch up on the latest political gossip I may go to any of the major newspaper or broadcast websites, whereas in Malaysia I’ll have to go to 2 websites and at least 5 different blogs to get the same diversity and quality of information.

In Europe as in Australia free flowing news and information is out there for all to see; opinions can be openly discussed and accessed. In Malaysia, this is less so. The mainstream media is a lot less trusted and the internet heavily used as underground and independent source of information on issues the people are craving to see.

Malaysians also look to different parts of the world for their information and news depending on which cultural background the user is from. The appearance of numerous China-based websites further down the Alexa rankings shows how potentially difficult it could be to target that segment of the Malaysian population.

Blogs to the rescue.

But where Malaysia truly shines are its blogs. Blogger.com & Wordpress.com are both simply gateways to thousands of independent blogs each with their own opinion followings and thought leaders. In order to really target Malaysians you have to get on the blogs and it’s quite telling that two of Malaysia’s largest advertising networks are focused around the blogsphere.