Mind Wars
This column is all about media as the battleground of the marketing world – a world constantly at war as each company pushes its brands in the name of service to the consumer, providing us with goods and services that our everyday lives depend on. Needless to say, political parties are also companies that push for their individual candidates as brands, promoting them and “selling” them to voters at election time. It is also about the marketing of media themselves – how individual media channels compete for our attention, and consequently become molders of our tastes and preferences.
Nielsen had been reporting about the steady rise of digital media – both in terms of the proliferation of digital devices such as the tablet PC and smartphones, and in terms of internet penetration among the population. And we have published statistics galore about how digital media is going to dominate our lives – the internet in general and social networking sites in particular. Now it is the turn of another major multinational research company to validate those reports.
TNS, or Taylor-Nelson Sofres, has published a report that is more focused on mobile internet-capable devices. The results confirmed expectations, in the sense that it established rapid growth for this particular sector, but it was still nonetheless a shock. A shock because the figure is truly unprecedented. In a press briefing, TNS announced that fully NINETY-ONE PERCENT (91%) of all digital mobile devices in the country access social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter. The growth jump almost doubles the size of the audience – coming from a mere 54% in 2010.
According to the TNS Survey, more than 81% of the country’s population have mobile phones, and at least 21 percent of them have more than one operating SIM card. And most of them (at least 73%) use their phones to send text messages, but the actual number of SMS messages has been slowly declining as the users become comfortable sending messages via the internet instead – usually via the social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook and Twitter, or switching to online chat, such as Yahoo! Messenger or Google Talk.
The phenomenal growth of SNS is riding on the back of parallel growth trends for the key drivers that support it: the continuing price erosion in mobile digital devices – it is now actually possible to purchase a tablet PC for as little as P3,000 (but at that price, one cannot help but wonder about its quality) – and the steady decline in access costs for ever faster broadband services. The Solid Group of David Lim has joined this bandwagon by introducing their own version of the tablet PC, to be known as the MyPad – the tablet format big sister of their MyPhone brand, it will retail for a mere P7,000. That’s a fraction of the cost of most tablet PC’s currently available.
From the telcos, we now have the pocket wi-fi device as the hottest new gadget. From the old-style plug-in device that gives your laptop a wireless connection to the internet, we now have a wireless device that doesn’t even need to be plugged in to your laptop. You can keep it in your pocket. Just turn it on, and voila, you have instant wi-fi wherever you (and your friends) are. Speeds are also getting more and more decent. It is now fairly normal to get up to 10Mbps connections on a regular basis. Pity the poor techie who lives outside of the geographical service area of the better internet service providers.
Although the real hot news in the telco world would be the entry of LTE – or Long Term Evolution, the long anticipated dawning of 4G wireless services. You could say the future has arrived. LTE is not just a technological breakthrough or turning point for modern communications. It will actually make mobile internet access the new standard for digital communications as it will in fact be faster than a fixed-line DSL or a cabled internet connection. With 4G, you will be able to watch television on your handset as if you were watching TV in your living room. Video teleconferencing will become the new norm for business meetings involving attendees from more than one ZIP Code.
The smartphone, the tablet PC, social networking sites (SNS), and LTE: these are the things that, together, will truly change our lives.
Globe already has it highlighted in their TV commercials. And Smart Communications already has it running. They just haven’t made any big announcements yet. But it shouldn’t take long before the service gets rolled out and most of their subscribers will be living in the first world, telecoms-wise, that is.
The speed? From 70 to 100, or even up to 150Mbps. Need we say more?
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