According to the Asian Strategy report 2017 released by Warc, Brands across Asia are being forced to re-think their marketing amid tighter budgets, with greater emphasis now being placed on cheaper channels,.
The report noted that India’s Digitisation offers new opportunities, While India still relies heavily on traditional media to connect with mass-market audiences, the country is now the world’s second largest smartphone market behind China. With millions of people coming online for the first time, new audiences are being created.
“India’s marketers are capitalising on this: the use of social media in Indian campaigns overtook wider Asia for the first time this year. Online video is another channel to watch in India, with 38% of campaigns using it, up from 29% last year. Creative based on emotive storytelling remains a consistent hallmark of many Indian campaigns” the report added.
It also revealed that Asian brands, in the race to produce ‘meaningful marketing’, are struggling to link their brand to relevant social issues.
An analysis by ad research firm Warc into submissions for the Warc Prize for Asian Strategy found the number of entries working on budgets of less than US$500,000 almost doubled from 25% to 44%.
In addition, the number with campaigns with more than US$3m to spend plummeted from 26% of entries two years ago to only 9% in 2016.
While sales remained the key aim for marketers, Warc found increasing importance was also being placed on market share and customer gain which it suggested demonstrated that brands are “seeking to hold to their position amid crowded categories and economic headwinds”.
In an illustration of the need for lower cost routes to market, Warc found brands were increasingly striving to earn media, with 53% of entries citing PR as a soft metric, up from 20% in 2015.
Content marketing, which Warc said has traditionally “lagged behind” western markets, has also grown in significance. One in five campaigns used it as their lead media channel, up from 4% last year.
And while TV remained the most popular lead channel, it fell 9% from 2015 with video climbed to 10%.
“While the data doesn’t confirm a direct correlation, online video is a more cost effective medium for marketers across the region to offer TV-style creative on more limited budgets,” Warc case study editor Lucy Aitken said.
Elsewhere in the research, the firm said it detected a rise in what it described as “meaningful marketing”, or brand purpose, with brands looking to link themselves to worthy issues and “emerging cultural narratives”.
The trend was particularly evident in India, it found, with the Grand Prix winner – Ariel Matic’s Share the Load campaign which addressed the changing role of women – among those looking to tackle societal issues.
