VietNamNet Bridge – Ad firms put a high hope on the development of 3G services, believing that the services bring them the golden opportunity to exploit the mobile market. However, the number of interested clients remains modest.

By the end of June 2012, Vietnam had had 60 million operational mobile phones, of which 10 million mobile phones regularly access to Internet with Wi-Fi or GPRS/3G, according to Nguyen Ha Duc Minh, Managing Director of ad firm AKA Digital.

In late 2011, Cimigo, a market survey firm, conducted a survey on the use of mobile phones in Vietnam. About 5800 people were interviewed in the survey which was carried out in 12 big urban areas including HCM City, Hanoi, Da Nang, Can Tho and Hai Phong.

According to Usami Le Vann, a senior executive of Cimigo, said in 2010, only 27 percent of polled people said they used mobile phones to access to Internet. Meanwhile, the percentage jumped o 60 percent in 2011, if counting on the 4 percent of tablet users.

According to Jefferey Teo, a senior executive of Buzzcity, a mobile ad firm, the figures in the Cimigo’s report showed that Vietnam is one of the 10 countries in the world which have the great potentials to develop the advertisement on mobile devices.

Minh also said that the analyses of 10 domestic websites for mobile phones such as 24H, or VnExpress, and the reports by market survey firms all say that there are about 927 million accesses to websites via mobile phones a month in 2012, mostly the websites designed specifically for mobile devices.

Sending SMS and hanging banners on websites or applications are the two most popular types of advertisement for now. Of the two, the former has been favored by ad firms and enterprises thanks to the low costs. However, this type of advertisement has its problems: the content is simple, while mobile phone users may get angry with uninterested ads.

In general, enterprises have to pay 400 dong for an ad, of which mobile network operators earn 70 percent.

“The art of the SMS ad is to send ad pieces to suitable clients at reasonable time, or the ad pieces would be considered as spam ads,” said Vu Hoang Tam, Managing Director of VHT.

Posting banners on websites and apps proves to bring higher efficiency, but enterprises would have to pay much higher at 5000-7000 dong.

According to AKA Digital, the percentage of mouse clicks to the ad banners on the website is 0.3-0.4 percent.

This type of ad has been chosen by big brands such as Samsung, Nokia, HTC, VinaPhone, MobiFone and Castrol. However, analysts believe that this would be the “model of the future” instead of the present time, because of the low demand of mobile phone users, small screen of mobile phones and the high fees.

“Few clients would click mouse into the banners on the websites,” Marketing Director of a home appliance distribution company said.

“When deciding to set up banners, one would design attractive contents in order to stimulate people to click mouse into the banners,” Minh said.

Due to the modest number of clients, there are not many domestic ad firms set up so far. Buzzcity is the name of a foreign ad firm well-known to Vietnamese businesses. Sources have said that Japanese Mediba would join the Vietnamese market soon.

Source: SGTT