The current mobile advertising market is $5.3 Billion in value, according to the IAB Mobile Marketing Center of Excellence. However, of that, $1.9B in 2011 was completely from the Asian-Pacific region of the world, driving almost 36% of the entire markets revenue. That’s actually 4.5% higher than the mobile market in North American.
Those are some pretty amazing numbers if you think about. It means that despite the US thinking of itself as being the center of the technology world, we are actually lagging behind in many ways. In fact, many studies show that the Asian market is dominated by mobile and tablets, with less and less people actually getting PCs. That means that the fastest growin market needs to be focused on the mobile market, not PC based internet advertising?
In fact, even in the US, Asians are driving mobile usage it seems. According to this study, Asian-Americans are more likely to have a mobile phone than any other ethnicity.
What does this mean exactly? It means that as marketers we need to reconsider how we market to people. Focusing on the next Acai offers that appeals to the general market isn’t going to cut it. More and more marketing needs to be not only niche based, but culturally based. That means not only focusing on people in other countries, but people of different background in the United States, who respond differently to advertising.
