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The first half of this year was exciting for marketers as it combined all the challenges we could imagine into the same period. While Bangkok situation is not very stable, we still see the growth in advertising spending. Digital advertising also increased significantly. Here is our view towards the past and the coming future.

Search Spending was doubled, and will be growing
During the first half of 2010, many of the high-involvement products were active on search engine marketing. Travel and consumer electronics are the biggest growth categories at almost doubled spending compared to the same period of 2009.

Simple reasons behind the growth is that significant number of consumers spend spends their time researching for information before making purchase decision in these categories. (Imagine yourself planning vacation or selecting your new laptop. This is pretty much in line with Google research released last year.)

Consumer goods and finance also become very active, however, from a relatively small base. We foresee even higher amount of budget being shifted into this area throughout the 2nd half of this year.

Facebook : A Massive Hit for both personal use and business
As a consumer, we all spent more and more time Facebooking with our friends either from computer, iPhone, or Blackberry. So do the 4.2 million other Thais. This is an absolute high growth of 7 times compared to the number of Facebook users in June 2009 and more than double of the number at the starting of this year. No wonder it’s a massive hit.

Thai marketers are quite quick responded to this change. More than 100 brands has created their “Fan Page” and start their conversation with their customers. Many of the early-adopted brands start rolling out their Facebook policy and procedures rather than doing it by “trial and error” like last year.

Many of them become even more active by leveraging the viralability of Facebook application, repeating the success of famous Neko Cat*, to create high awareness in a short period of time. Here are some of the examples: -

Daily Menu by Nutrilite : http://apps.facebook.com/nutrilitedailymenu
Acer Innovation Unlock : http://apps.facebook.com/innovation-unlock
My DELL My Design : http://apps.facebook.com/mydellmydesign

We foresee this hit will keep continue throughout the year and may start shifting more to mobile devices as well as integrated more with offline activities.

* Oishi Maneki Neko – a fortune telling cat launched in 2009: http://apps.facebook.com/fortunecats

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