Watch out:it'll soon be a digital life for all

So says Kent Wertime, president for Asia/Pacific of ad agency OgilvyOne Worldwide and co-author of the new book "DigiMarketing".

"In many countries this has already happened, with the Web and TV neck and neck in use by consumers for leisure activities. In other countries the move to digital may be slower, but no one denies that it will happen," he said.

Wertime said that this has a profound impact on marketing.

Digital media are two-way, meaning that consumers can and do talk back and are increasingly creating their own content. They are reshaping the content sent to them from marketers.

Traditionally, marketers have talked about "target markets", betraying the way they saw consumers, as passive targets. Well, now those consumers are participants who want to be actively involved in the marketing process.

"The question is how quickly marketers will shift their money to digital," Wertime said.

Marketers need to understand that digital media are not just selling products to people but interacting with them.

"With digital media, marketers can send questions and allow people to take part in the process by listening to their feedback and knowing their actual wants. It is a free way to do consumer research effectively," he said. He added that Thai consumers were talkative and had many opinions they could share comfortably online.

Wertime said that one key benefit of digital media was that they were more effective and more targeted and able to deliver different messages to different types of people.

He gave the example of more efficient ways for such marketers in sending invitations to 50,000 IT managers, among them many potential buyers of mainframe computers, to get them to a trade show.

Wertime said that about 20 per cent of the Thai population currently went online. They are younger, richer and more urbanised than the general population.

Last year Thailand had over nine million Internet-users, according to Nielsen.

About one-third of those were in the provinces. Fifty per cent were aged between 20 and 44, a very attractive group for marketers. According to Euromonitor, Internet-users in Thailand are projected to hit 23 million by 2010.

And then there are mobile-phone users, who will soon be accessing the Web from their mobile devices in increasing numbers.

Wertime's co-author, Dr Ian Fenwick, an adviser at the Sasin Graduate Institute of Business Administration of Chulalongkorn University, said digital was like a common language, characterised by interactivity, engagement and personalisation.

Content prepared originally for the Web can be repurposed and moved across devices such as mobile or digital billboards at almost no additional cost.

"The price of digital advertising is also 'cost per action', so that if you don't do something, you need not pay anything. It's quite different from traditional media, which is 'cost per thousand', based on the sheer size of audiences," he said.

Fenwick added that small com-panies could be more flexible to apply digital media at less cost and risk.

He said that at the moment digital was mainly used as a complement: in most countries digital is about 15 per cent of marketing expenditure, though growing by more than 20 per cent per annum.

Yet in Thailand digital marketing is only about 1 per cent of total marketing.

"But as we've seen, the use of digital media is on the rise everywhere and the conventional media are themselves becoming digital. I'm sure that conventional media will persist in niche applications, but in the mainstream digital will dominate."