By: Yohan P Chawla
Mobile is the main driver of the digital transformation that will see India – fueled by rapidly expanding digital infrastructure and greater accessibility to technology — become a trillion-dollar digital economy. Ninety percent of India will own a mobile phone in the next three years, by 2022.
As the face of the Indian mobile user keeps changing, and changing not just across the major and minor metros but across the high-growth Tier II and Tier III cities and beyond, it becomes important to understand the dynamics of the change.
The INMOBI report entitled The Changing Face Of The Indian Mobile User provides a good look at the 2019 Advertising Industry Overview, the main challenges for marketers in 2019, and five mobile marketing trends to look out for. An important part of the offering relates to the key consumption trends.
Here are some of them.
Languages: Regional and Hindi to rule
Since 2015, rural India has added 100 million people to consume the internet. The handbook also states that 9 out of 10 new internet users in India are likely to consume content over the internet in their own regional languages.
In a span of 10 years from 2011 to 2021 it is expected that Hindi would be the language of choice for internet users with a 12x growth rate, with a total pool of 521 million Hindi speakers. In the same time frame English speakers of a pool of 125 million people may contribute to just a 2x rate of growth.
Gaming a major play
With more than 250 million gamers in the country and an average of 60 minutes spent per day on games, India is definitely one of the fastest growing markets for online games. By 2022 it is expected that the gaming fever will engulf close to 368 million people in India. Now that is massive. Marketers and brands are actively looking at the online gaming and fantasy gaming space to leverage this growth onto their brands by advertising.
Another stat that supports the above statement is that majority gamers of about 92% prefer to download “free to play” games as compared to 28% gamers play freemium games and just 11% pay to play games.
OTT vs Live TV
Connected devices are driving solid growth for OTT platforms. India had about 103.5 million smartphone video viewers in 2018 which is expected to reach 224.7 smartphone video viewers in the year 2022.
Similarly the average time spent on video consumption in the year 2018 is 52 minutes per user per day, which is expected to grow to about 84 minutes per user per day by 2020.
Business of advertising
Digital media ad spends at the moment, contribute to about 15% of the total ad spends in the industry. However, this number is expected to reach 24% of the entire market by 2020. On an overall level, Indian advertising industry is pegged to touch INR 77,623 CR which will be mainly driven by smartphone revolution and obviously the digital spends.
