Mobile advertising in Singapore to balloon 20% by 2018

Will other segments keep up?

According to PwC’s annual Global Entertainment and Media Outlook 2013-2017, Singapore's mobile advertising is growing from a small base, with growth forecast over the next five years of 20% CAGR.

Meanwhile, the digital music segment is growing at 15.7% CAGR over the next five years. Online gaming in Singapore is growing significantly and will see a 14.5% CAGR over the next five years, which will overtake console gaming in 2016.

Despite a period of modest growth, some segments will still constitute a significant portion of total E&M spend in Singapore.

Following a fall in spending towards the end of the last decade, the out-of-home (OOH) advertising market will enter a sustained period of growth at 8.3% CAGR. This is helped by innovative technologies and infrastructure improvements.

Newspaper publishing revenues from sales and advertising, which represent a significant portion of the total E&M spend in Singapore, will achieve growth of 1.4% to 2017, despite a global shift to online sources for news. A similar trend will also emerge in Consumer magazine publishing.

Television advertising and subscription revenues will achieve steady growth of 3.5% over the forecast period despite the increasing competition and the evolution of over-the-top (OTT) offerings. Regulation will also continue to evolve in the face of this competition and changing consumer expectations.

“The growing affluence of a rapidly emerging middle class consumer with a propensity to spend on entertainment and media experiences, combined with improving infrastructure in many high growth markets is bolstering overall growth rates in a number of key segments.

Universally, E&M companies need to invest in developing and distributing content in ways that compel customers to loyalty and take advantage of their propensity to engage in sharing content experiences; this will require enhanced digital media measurement tools and business models that respond to the changing patterns of consumer behaviour.

It really is all down to focussing on customer insight and being agile enough to respond operationally and to innovate with new business models: that’s the new licence to operate," said Charlotte Hsu, Entertainment & Media Industry Leader, PwC.