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Published on February 3, 2008

Kasamart Neerapatama, 40, vice president of Sanook Online, believes that the emerging generation of online media professionals needs to have more diverse qualifications than previous generations.

"Take online advertising as an example. I think you need to have strong marketing communication skills and be very creative and technology-savvy if you're going to do well in this field," says Kasamart, who is also chief executive of Top Space, a unit of Sanook. Top Space is positioning itself as an online media agency, representing Hi5, Hipkingdom, MCOT and shopping and e-commerce websites associated with eBay.

However, the country's online ad market is still in its infancy, accounting for just 0.5 to 1 per cent of total ad spending.

"In money terms, it's just something like Bt450 million to Bt900 million a year in a market worth a total of Bt90 billion. So traditional media, like TV, newspapers, radio, cinemas etc still reign supreme.

"To move online ads forward, we need the clients, ad agencies, media buyers etc to work together.

"Multinational companies like Unilever, Pepsi, Sony or Samsung or Intel are all well aware of the benefits and growing strengths of online ads and now aim as much as 50 per cent of spending at online customers.

"However, many Thai firms are still catching up in terms of awareness, even though the online population in Thailand is growing by leaps and bounds, totalling 13.6 million users at the latest count," said the former ad-agency executive, who switched to online media in 2003.

In the world of online ads, the prime space is diagonal, from the screen's top-left corner to the bottom-right corner.

Ads in these areas are the most expensive since they attract the most attention from viewers.

Besides standard banner ads, advertisers may opt for customised versions such as ads that take over a user's home page, viral brand profile ads and skin-like ads, among others.

"In the so-called viral marketing campaigns, we engage our targeted audience by holding some sort of cool activity, such as having a photo contest for a fan club of, say, users of Toyota Yaris, or the Nokia N70 series may hold a photo or video contest to marry its product's personality with that of prospective customers.

"So if you happened to holiday in India and visit the Taj Mahal, you may take photos or a short video of yourself with it in the background then upload it onto the Net and show it off to friends. It'll become viral if we can successfully engage our brand's personality with that of the collective audience, who will then help spread the message. It's the era of digital-brand engagement.

"For example, Hi5 now has about two million members in Thailand aged from 15 to 40. It has become a very popular social network around the world in the last two years with a total worldwide membership of 80 million.

"In Thailand, Hi5's biggest age group is 18 to 29 as they account for over 60 per cent of the total.

"Unlike the pen-pal system in the previous era of slow airmail, in which you make friendships one to one, Hi5 is a global friendship network of many-to-many since when you have a group of friends, friends of friends can become your new friends.

"It's like a chain relationship and a very powerful networking platform which can be used by advertisers in the digital era.

"In other words, it's not just the space for ads on the Net but also its coverage. In our case, we could cover as many as 65 per cent of Net-users here, given the coverage of networks that we're representing.

"Yet one of our challenges is also to develop a new breed of people who have skills diverse enough to really tap the potential of this digital era in terms of advertising," he said.

Nophakhun Limsamarnphun

nop1122@yahoo.com