How can advertisers in Asia avoid becoming victims of TV's success?

In Asia, at least, the appeal of user generated online content has been solidly overshadowed by the much more attractive proposition of professional content.

A significant number of users may have moved platforms and are certainly time-shifting to reflect their increasingly non-linear lives, but television still remains the most popular medium in the region, and by a large margin.

For advertisers, the situation is even more pronounced. Speak with any media agency trading arm and they will agree that the vast majority of their time is spent buying and negotiating for TV. But this in itself has led to a challenging market environment.

Free-to-air broadcasters are firmly in the driving seat when it comes to price. In most countries in the region, these broadcasters are operating as monopolies or duopolies, often with full government backing, which severely hampers the negotiation process.

This has given rise to huge inflation across the region, save for a few underperforming markets such as Japan and Taiwan. Add to this the drop in available advertising time, which is further restricting access, and the situation arises whereby clients are paying much more for even less exposure.

One solution for brands could come in the form of online video. If the online players can raise their game and provide high quality content in a safe (i.e. regulated) environment, then advertisers would be quick to switch a larger portion of their spend.

The online media owners are working hard to achieve this. Youku.com in China, for example, has just entered into a deal with Nielsen whereby the latter will provide it with viewing metrics similar to those for traditional TV delivery systems.

Likewise, traditional broadcasters are only too aware of this potential threat to their revenue model and are beginning to launch their own online properties (see CCTV in China and MediaCorp’s partnership with Microsoft in Singapore).

A second way forward could be for advertisers to take ownership of the content, either directly or through partnerships with media agencies. GroupM, for example, is bringing to Asia a model - already successful in the US and UK - of buying content (either as ready-made content or in the form production rights) and selling as a package to local broadcasters with their clients attached.

Either way, the TV industry in Asia can at least be content that, despite the early and transient appeal of watching skateboarding dogs on YouTube, old-fashioned broadcast content is still what consumers and advertisers want most.

Got a view?
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This article was originally published in the 22 April 2010 issue of Media.