2010 World Cup to boost mobile ads 07/09/2009 |
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South Africa's cellphone advertising industry would be strongly boosted by the 2010 World Cup, a US-based research group said yesterday.
JBB Research said it expected advertisers to use cellphone devices as a key platform during the month-long World Cup, which starts on June 11.
Mobile advertising is expected to be the key driver of the UGC (user-generated content) market in South Africa as the country prepares for the world's most-watched sporting event.
The country's UGC market - which included advertising-funded social networking, chat and dating services like Facebook and MXit - was expected to grow to 24 million users and $476 million (R3.7 billion) in revenue by 2013 from a current 14.2 million customers and $195m in revenue, JBB said.
"Many advertisers want to take advantage of this global event.
"At the end of the day, this could mean more money towards mobile advertising," JBB analyst Julien Blin said.
"During the World Cup, you will see the emergence of various advertising funded mobile UGC applications... featuring video streaming and video-based mobile blogging capabilities."
Vodacom, South Africa's biggest cellphone operator, which is owned by British Vodafone, has the largest portfolio of advertising-funded mobile services such as The Grid.
"The other carriers are lagging behind," Blin said.
Despite the potential, JBB warned that for the UGC market to reach its potential, South Africa needed to overcome the high cost of multimedia- capable handsets and lack of return on investment from operators in existing mobile data services.
"I think the World Cup is going to offset most of these inhibitors," Blin said, predicting that digital video broadcasting-capable handsets were likely to be commercially available in South Africa by the end of this year.
"Instant messaging-based enhanced chat services like MXit, MTN's noknok, Vodacom's Meep and Facebook have gained traction over the past few years," Blin said.
"In fact, most young South Africans do not speak on their phones.
"Instead, many use those mobile social networking services to communicate with each other."
(Source Reuters)
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