Young Asians show music and mobile fetish

Singapore - Marketers wanting to engage with the Young Asian, aged 8 to 24, should invest in marketing strategies which use the music and online gaming platforms according Synovate's Young Asians study.

Representatives from Yahoo, Singapore Telecommunications (SingTel) and Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, echoed these claims at today's press briefing in response to questions regarding some of the figures from Synovate's third edition of its Young Asian Survey.

Figures from the survey showed, in terms of internet activities participated in the last 30 days in Singapore, 62% of respondents said online games and 59% said they listened to music.

On a regional level, which includes Australia, 37% of respondents said they couldn't live without the internet and 29% said the same about mobile phones. Wong Soon Nam, VP of consumer marketing for SingTel said the findings were not a surprise and validates some of the marketing activities SingTel has been doing for the youth. He also said the music and online gaming platforms would be areas where he would put more effort into what SingTel has been doing.

When it came to mobile, figures from the survey revealed that only 5% felt the mobile phone gave useful information and only 6% said it was a best entertainment source.

When asked whether the figures represented a failure on marketers' part to meaningfully engage with ‘Young Asian' consumers through the mobile platform, acting GM for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions in Singapore, Richard Huggins agreed.

However, Yahoo head of marketing for SE Asia, Bennett Porter said it was not that marketers were not using the medium rather, mobile hasn't been made easy for marketers to use, and access and buy and learn. She also warned marketers not to provide the exact same experience on the web, on the mobile phone, as it would be a failure.

Other notable results from the survey include figures for the total number of hours of activities Young Asians did per day which found Singaporeans spent 39.1 hours worth of activities per day. Porter said one thing the survey helps validate is today's consumers a master hyper-taskers and it's not something that executives only do but teenagers as well.

"As a marketer and also as an advertising solution, what that tells us is that we need to make sure that we reach out to consumers in all of those places, not just online or not just offline but on the mobile phone and be able to offer solutions that allow advertisers to leverage all of the services and touchpoints that are important to them," she said.

The Young Asians 2008 survey had a sample size of 11,886, with Singapore making up 893 of this figure, and included Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore.