I recently gave a talk at the 8th Pinoy Media Congress, an event for Communications majors and educators by ABS-CBN. ABS-CBN is one of the biggest television and media networks in the Philippines (if not the biggest). The Congress, geared to inform and educate, had me speaking on my craft, social media and digital advertising.
Pinoy Media Congress 8 – An Interesting Question
I gave a talk on social media’s part in digital advertising now, and during the questions and answers portion of the program, I was asked a very interesting question. So interesting in fact, that it merited this article. The following is non-verbatim:
“It seems like advertising on social media [digital] is free/very cheap, as compared with advertising on traditional media like television, print, and radio. Why not just advertise on social media [digital]?”
It was a brilliant question. The following is my more detailed answer, a personal opinion as numbers are hard to find especially here in the Philippines, and is divided into two parts.
Yes, brands and companies should shift more of their advertising budget on digital. Why is this so? Primarily, the Internet user-base of the Philippines is huge – and is growing exponentially. Google Philippines Managing Director Narc Reyes predicts that “…the number of Internet users in the country will double from its current amount, to about 66 million users.” That’s a huge market, considering that the entire population of the Philippines is just shy of a hundred million. This means that brands and companies have a LARGE portion of their respective target audience online – and one can only sell when one sells to where people are.
No, brands and companies cannot advertise just on digital. As per the point stated above, there is currently over 30 million Filipinos on the Internet on a regular basis – but what about the other two-thirds? They aren’t – this means that traditional advertising such as television and/or print still has a big role to play in the ad spend of numerous organizations.
What About Moving Forward?
Dr. Donald Lim, Managing Director of award-winning digital agency MRM Worldwide Manila (and my boss, it so happens), estimates that the maximum advertising pesos spent on digital marketing is PHP 2 billion. With an estimated total ad spend of PHP 100 billion, spending on digital advertising – social media included – is at a measly 2%. In other words: digital still has a large market to capture.
Were you at the Pinoy Media Congress 8? Please feel free to ask any questions in the comments!
About Jason Cruz
