VietNamNet Bridge – The Vietnamese advertising market grew strongly in 2013, with television channels still dominating the market, although they are competing with one another fiercely to lure customers, experts in the industry said.

A printing machine on display at an advertising exhibition in HCM City.

Data on the local advertising market in 2013 is not yet available. However, television channels represent up to 92% of total advertising sales of local media of some VND10.9 trillion in the first six months of 2013, said Tran Thi Thanh Mai, general director of Kantar Media Vietnam.

According to Kantar Media Vietnam, there are 198 television channels operated by 65 public television stations and 11 pay television service suppliers in the country.

TV advertising is said to affect shopping decisions, with as much as 45% of the respondents saying television decided their shopping behavior based on a recent survey conducted by Kantar Media.

In particular, TV advertising in 2013 marked a record in terms of prices when a company paid up to VND280 million to have their product advertised during an ad break from The Voice Kids program on VTV3 for only 30 seconds.

Along with TV advertising, digital advertising including online and mobile advertising also posted strong sales growth last year.

Statistics of market research companies demonstrate that there are 32.5 million Internet users currently, with those surfing the net via mobile phones amounting to 21 million.

Three actions that Internet users perform when online using their mobile phones is to enjoy entertainment content, update news and search for information. Some 86% of local Internet users use social networks, with Facebook attracting the most members, at up to 14 million.

In a report on the mobile website situation sent to the Daily recently, Opera Company based in Norway reported that giant international websites like Facebook and Google captured the first positions in the list of the most popular websites accessed by this mobile browser system.

In November, there were over 262 million people using Opera mobile browser system, with Vietnam among the top ten nations using the system globally. A representative of Google in Vietnam said the firm’s business in the local market still fared well but he declined to reveal the specific figure.

Meanwhile, Mai noticed that advertising in newspapers and magazines was suffering a decline which is projected to continue in the near future. There are around 800 newspapers and magazines in Vietnam.

Tran Thi Lan Thanh, general director of Goldsun Focus Media, reported that all figures of the advertising industry indicated sales growth. “The advertising market will continue growing in 2014 at a speed which is not as strong as it was in 2013 but it will still be higher than the inflation rate,” Thanh forecast.

Source: SGT