A total of 37 companies converged at Suntec Convention Centre for a 2-day conference, with key exhibitors that included namesake powerhouses like Friendster, Google, Yahoo! SEA. In addition to that, there were SMEs that were making their presence felt - Comwerks Interactive, i-POP, and Acronym Media. However, the real deal was in the keynotes as well as the various SIG speeches that were held during the event.

There were a couple of interesting sessions that were by-invitation only - of which one of them featured Wendy Cheng and Jeff Ooi in a session titled “Blogging Universe - Building Brand Awareness or Losing Control”. There were other head honchos and key decision makers from various conglomerates that were present at the convention to present their nuggets of valuable insight into a market that has gotten people spending US$25-billion dollars worldwide just on online advertising alone in 2007 (according to statistics revealed by PricewaterhouseCooper’s 7th annual Global Etertainment and Media Outlook report).

Here’s an excerpt of our visit at the event:

Friendster

Friendster certainly made their presence felt at the exhibition with their towering booth splattered with a sign that speaks about its equally towering success: “Connect to over 70-million people globally”. In accordance to statistics provided by comScore Media Metrix - Friendster has the highest engagement (minutes spent per month per unique user) value than its competitors such as Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and Hi5. In addition to that, Friendster is claiming to be the most popular social network in Asia with over 52-million registered users and 36-million monthly unique visitors from the region. While that claim may be true to a certain degree - in retrospect, however, an old article by Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at HITWISE, placed more visits to Facebook than porn sites:

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here’s a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I’ve actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines.

Statistics, like the ones above, may not remain the same after a few months but it would definitely have made a big difference in the way social networking sites have affected our lifestyle. In fact, the popularity of these social networkings site have spawned an army of clones, varying in content delivery methods and features. An aggregated list can be found at Mashable, aptly titled “Social Networking GOD”, with provision to links for close to 350 such sites.

In the last several months, Friendster has revealed a couple of features to further diversify their social networking site’s capability. One of them is the Friendster Mobile, a feature that enables the site to be mobile-friendly for users to access to. Coupled with the localization languages, it is a definitely powerful tool to reach out to the non-English market in the Pan-Asian region. To this date, there are a total of 9 languages that the site can be accessed in - Thai, Malay, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. While localization is a powerful methodo to open their doors to a wider audience, it is their developer’s program that takes the cake.

If we do remember, Friendster initially started out serving their pages written in JavaScript before moving them over to the PHP platform. It wouldn’t be right to say that Facebook was the first to come up with a developers’ playpen (read: API) but it is in the case of Facebook’s success story with the developers’ community that has probably spurned Friendster to go along with it as well. In any case, community-driven web applications and its contents are here to stay for good.

Financial Times

This is actually labeled as a cyber lounge that’s sponsored by Financial Times, for delegates to sit down and rest their tired soles. There were also a couple of notebooks were placed at the booth for public usage.

Singapore Press Holdings

An equally towering presence in the exhibition hall was SPH’s booth. One of the major product featured at the booth was the Rednano, touted as “Singapore’s first local search and directory engine”. One of the key features that Rednano was offering was its advertising capabilities. While their advertising features were interesting, as much to the delight to of any company that wished to reach out to the local audience - one of the discerning features that I found out was that it lacked any user customization capabilities. Unlike most web statistical analytical tools/sites that you can find - Rednano lacks such. I found out (according to the staff that I spoke to) that you would have to get back to Rednano if you, per say, wanted to obtain statistical charts for your marketing reports. Any form of information would be given upon request, and Rednano will revert back to you with your - request. It is quite understandably that the product is still in its beta phase and they might push the project into a full-fledged advertising platform in the next month or so but for now, knowing that the advertising rates are on-par with any other given advertising agencies yet with the absence of information at your fingertips when your boss needs it - unless you are easy-going with your ROI statistics despite the assuring privacy policy.

dgm

dgm, otherwise known as dealgroupmedia, is an online advertising and marketing company that specializes - well, in everything that’s online. One of their specialty is in search engine marketing consultancy that branches out in ethical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) solutions and PPC (Pay Per Click) management.

XM

The corporate colors decked out at XM’s booth must be one of the more interesting ones that I’ve seen so far. Their corporate brief states they have been around since 1994, which is a pretty long while and possess a string of successful A&P campaigns which included the all-too-familiar Nokia’s L’amour mobile phone campaign. They are a provision of front-end solutions for the integration of web presence alongside with any A&P/marketing campaigns.

FOX Networks

FOX Networks was at the exhibition to showcase a pioneering concept that they called the BrandFormance, which they claim is a brand-building performance-based solution. For me, it is a prettier name for “AIO”. The strong point about their solution is that they have access to a slew of websites that include the National Geographic Channel, FOX-relevant channels, as well as other premium third-party publishers. Lest, not we forget that they have access to scripted banners on their video-on-demand streaming channels. Frederic Guillet, Regional Director for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong operations, said that “today’s audiences are increasingly immune to advertising messages that flash across their screens”. In addition, they are putting it across that their solution will allow advertisers to purchase quantifiable results on premium websites at a far lowest cost than if they were to obtain advertisments via a traditional media buying strategy.

Aktiv Digital

Aktiv Digital is part of the dgm corporation’s subsidiary known as dgmAdNetwork. However, they represnt some of the biggest clients in the Pan-Asian market including BT, O2 and Vodafone. Just recently, Aktiv Digital had announced a partnership with Crunchyroll to handle the latter’s advertising inventory in the Pan-Asian region. The partnership will aim to deliver a full range of online marketing services, from display and rich media solutions to advertiser integration and micro-sites. Kun Gao, CEO of Crunchyroll, added “with a strong track record with international advertisers (such as Ubisoft, Puma, Best Buy, Comedy Central and Dimension Films), Asia¹s 500 million online consumers represent a huge growth opportunity and a key market for us. Crunchyroll is making a dedicated contribution to the future of the Asia Pacific online industry and believe a partnership with Aktiv Digital is ideal in securing success.”

Google & DoubleClick

Google - the household name in the interconnected global network. It needs no further explanation. However, DoubleClick did make an appearance at the show. We even got a free compact-disc with a pretty printed label of DoubleClick stuck on the top side. It was supposed to be loaded with some information, we assume, but it didn’t work that way when we loaded the disc into the optical drive.

Yahoo! SEA

Yahoo! Search Marketing’s team made their presence felt at the exhibition hall. There were staff who provided a step-by-step demonstration with explanation on how to use their advertising/marketing applications - done on a huge 46″ LCD screen. They even had a booklet, titled “Smart Start”, that you could take back for reference as an “insider’s guide to managing your new search marketing account and spending wisely [sic]“. Something worth to note - Yahoo showcased a preview of its search applications for mobile users using intuitive mini Web pages to present search results on mobile screens and voice recognition technology at the recent CommunicAsia2008.

Sadly, we weren’t able to obtain access pass to the various discussion conferences. Hopefully, however, we may be able to make in time for the ad:tech Shanghai 2008 that will be taking place this coming November.

All personal views iterated in this article are of the writer’s own and does not reflect the Company’s point of view.
Do you think the author’s photography suck? You can reach the author via michael.feng@frro.net.

Tags: ad:tech, Aktiv Digital, dgm, DoubleClick, FOX, Friendster, google, XM, Yahoo!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 28th, 2008 at 07:17 and is filed under Business, Insight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.