Singaporeans own the most smartphones in Asia Pacific

But advertisers struggle as Neilsen reveals a significant level of resistance among smartphone users towards mobile advertising.

According to a release, Although smartphone popularity is soaring across the Asia Pacific region, resulting in increased consumption of mobile media, advertisers are yet to identify the key to effective engagement via mobile advertising, according to a global study undertaken by Nielsen, a leading global provider of insights and information on what consumers watch and buy.

Nielsen’s Smartphone Insights Study, conducted across 39 markets globally (including 13 Asia Pacific markets), highlighted the prevalence of smartphones in the Asia Pacific region in recent years, and in many markets smartphones now out-number non-smartphones, including Singapore, which has the highest smartphone ownership in Asia Pacific, Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

As smartphone ownership continued to increase, mobile internet usage was also on the rise, in particular social networking and internet search. Mobile social networking was especially popular in Hong Kong and Malaysia, where 76 percent and 74 percent of smartphone users respectively engaged in mobile social networking in the past month.

“Growing use of location-based services and location-aware services such as maps and navigation present strong opportunities for companies to tap into the functionality and insight that these services present,” observes Vishal Bali, Managing Director of Nielsen’s Telecom Industry Group in the APMEA Region.

“In particular, location-aware services provide great potential for location-based shopping and convenience services. Although currently both location-based and location-aware services are being primarily utilized by smartphone users in mature markets such as Korea, Japan, Singapore and China, other markets in Asia such as Indonesia and Malaysia where currently the usage is more focused on social networking and search will be quick to catch up as availability of these services improves.”

The constant connectivity of smartphones provides an ideal platform for advertisers to reach their consumers, however, to date we are seeing a significant level of resistance among smartphone users towards mobile advertising,” states Bali. “Hence, it becomes important for advertisers to understand various factors that can help to improve acceptance levels and provide a better ROI.”

Bali notes that such factors include, but are not limited to:
1. improved creative and design elements tailored to the mobile platform;
2. availability of various ad formats to cater to different screen sizes as well as having a targeted approach rather than going for mass advertising; and
3. utilizing contextual advertisements that are location-specific and provide smartphone users with access to free content.

“Marketers must build in these key hooks to get a better response and engagement with their brands,” concludes Bali.