Online adverts forecast to soar in Kingdom

Advertising and marketing company Omnicom Media Group's platforms director, Tiwa York, said Thailand was a growing market for online advertising in the region. Within the next four years, it would become a top-three market in terms of growth rate after China and India.
"I strongly believe that online advert spending will represent 5 per cent of total adverts, up from 2 per cent now," he said, though from January to May advertising expenditure via television, according to a Nielsen survey, accounted for 61 per cent of total advertising spending.
Russel Conrad, regional director for Southeast Asia of Effective Measure, a Melbourne-based online measurement company, said the rise would result from the growing number of Internet users in the Kingdom. This year the company found that there were 24.5 million users, a 33-per-cent penetration rate, double that of three years ago.
The company's survey also found that Thailand was No 1 in terms of number of online early adopters - people who start using a technology as soon as it comes available - in the region, followed by the Philippines and Indonesia. The Kingdom was ranked as third in terms of the number of online-service users who access the Internet via mobile phones, behind Indonesia and Singapore. In addition, John Pradithavanij, sales director of Admax Network, a leading digital-advertising network in Southeast Asia, said this trend would result in a big change in the online advertising industry, especially the way to measure success of online campaigns.