“Time to move from traditional advertising to DIGITAL ADVERTISING”

"Sri Lankan companies should adopt the digital change in advertising to drive growth due to increasing number of mobile and internet penetration in the island", advertising experts say.

“Digital media is gaining popularity all across Asia and it is becoming imperative for brands to go digital,” CVL Srinivas, Chief Executive of Group M South Asia said.
“If you come across a market like India, the Google advertising market is about 8 percent from the total advertising cost,”

Sri Lanka spends 4 to 5 percent from the total advertising cost into digital marketing. In markets like Australia, United Kingdom and United States, the percentage spent on digital media is 20 to 25 percent from the total advertising cost. That are the numbers in more mature markets. For example, the largest medium for advertising in UK is Google. Google has more advertising than all the print publication and Television channels.

Meantime the amount of the money spent on traditional media is coming down at a higher pace.

Digital advertising or internet advertising is used by companies to leverage internet tools or electronic devices to deliver promotional campaigns. Devices like personal computers, smart phones, cellphones, tablets and platforms such as websites, e-mail, apps, social media networks is been used to engage continuously with stakeholders for advertising.

One thing quite predictable in markets like Sri Lanka and India or South Asia is, you will very soon witness the four percent or the eight percent going up to 20 percent or more due to the mobile penetration.

In the present, more than 6.8 million people in the world use smart devices and more than 400 million people use twitter globally, data shows. When it comes to Sri Lanka, more than 20 percent of the population use smart devices. A recent report said that the Island’s mobile market surpassed the 100 percent subscriber penetration in early 2014.The mobile penetration has exceeded 110 percent in Sri Lanka and India also has gone up to 80 to 90 percent.

Mainly because of the drastically increasing mobile penetration and the increasing time that people spend on the mobile phone, it’s only a matter of time for advertisers and brands to switch to Digital.

“This is the time that market needs to understand how to use digital, whether you want run the same advertisement that you run on television in digital, how do I target this digital segment of people,” “So when gates open up all the advertisers are prepared.”

According to this latest published report by internetlivestats.com, Sri Lanka is ranked 74th among 198 countries, in terms of total internet users.

The report says the Island has about 4,267,507 internet users sourcing data from International Telecommunication Union (ITU), United Nations Population Division, Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), and the World Bank.

Sri Lanka has about 2.4 million face book users.