I recently attended Ad:Tech Singapore, mainly to get a feel of the general sentiment in the marketing community in Asia.

I have to say, much of the sentiment is the same. The main focus is still the dollars and cents; basically measuring the performance of various marketing mediums, finding cheaper/better ways to reach the user/customer and providing better value to the user.

A lot of talk was on digital marketing, and how it has to be connected with traditional media and social media on both ends of the spectrum.

In terms of marketing technology of the future, mobile seems to be standing out from the rest (although I still have my qualms about mobile’s unique ability to more deeply invade and distract the user and in some cases make them pay for it.

Incidently, Yahoo now has mobile advertising. See http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/mobile/

Video-on-demand seems to be another big innovation (especially with large content publishers and television networks).

One of the main differences in Asia (apart from the less mature markets) is the distribution of online spend. As far of marketing budgets go, the online budget is almost about 1%, much less than the (>20%) average in US and Europe.

I heard the same complains from online advertising companies that 30% of your customers are online so shouldn’t 30% of your budget be allocated to online mediums. I still disagree with this thought process.

Simply because online marketing (when done right) provides a better ROI than a print ad in a popular publication/ tradeshows and especially TV ads. So while I agree that online budgets should increase, I do so for an entirely different reason, they work!

In the words of one of the panelist from Yahoo. Online marketing flattens the marketing ‘ecosystem‘ - your prospects go from awareness to retention to acquistion almost immediately.