Global Marketing News – 20th May 2015
Russia’s biggest social network VK has beaten television in battle for audience share
A report by Russian media research team, TNS, shows that VK had 13.2 million users in March this year. This is compared to audience figures of 10.9 million for the state owned TV channel, Channel One.
VK, previously known as VKontakte, has about eight times the daily users of Facebook and is Europe’s largest social network.
Comparisons between social networks and TV Channels have to be approximate as they’re calculated differently. However, the figures highlight the way that internet companies are gaining on traditional media.
As the recent economic crisis in Russia has led to a shrinking advertising budget, television advertising has fallen by about 22% in the first quarter of 2015.
But for the same period, internet companies saw an increase in advertising revenue and contextual advertising, or targeted online ads, showed a rise of 16%.
UK is largest global ecommerce export economy
Recent data from digital marketing company, Rakuten, suggests that the UK has become the largest export economy in the world when it comes to e-commerce.
15% of UK e-commerce sales comes from international markets and a whopping 340 million shoppers come from outside the UK.
As the retail market enjoys the boom, leaders of international companies are being urged to share the secrets of their success.
Most of these depend on the individual regions; for example, countries in the Asia Pacific region offer particularly unique opportunities.
Consumers in China have had access to a 4G service for much longer, and know exactly what they want from an online retailer. African consumers use their mobiles in a different way and have a high mobile penetration.
The UK has the advantage of a reliable and flexible postal service and can export to other countries very quickly. It also has a high standard of technical ability and that, along with developing good relationships with international partners, has made it well suited to spotting where opportunities lie.
WeChat grows to 549 million monthly active users
The free messaging app, developed by Chinese company, Tencent, saw an increase of 9.8% in monthly active users at the end of 2014. That’s up 39% from the start of the year.
WeChat was first released in 2011 and in 2013 had 195 million users a month. Now it has 549 million, making it the largest standalone messaging app.
However, these figures don’t show where users are based, so it’s hard to assess its global impact. Rivals such as WhatsApp and Viber have a large global following but Tencent says it is keen to pursue an overseas market.
Tencent has recently also seen revenue increases as a result of the growing popularity of smartphone games.
A French start-up’s search engine matches experts to projects on a global scale
ideXlab, has launched an open platform for innovative small and medium enterprises, otherwise known as OPENISME.
Founded in 2011, ideXlab is hoping to bring together innovative companies from around the world; something previously only available to larger companies with larger budgets.
Experts who are willing to collaborate will be identified from the academic world. They will then be brought together to build a network and the company’s algorithms will look at data to establish the expert’s level of competency.
The company already has partnerships in France, the UK, Germany, Italy and Turkey and is hoping to promote the platform further across Europe.
Should Apple buy Greece?
And finally, As Greece struggles to pay 750 million Euros in debt interest to the IMF, someone has come up with a novel solution to its problem.
At a recent investor conference it was suggested that Apple should use some of their $194 billion dollar cash pile to actually buy the country.
The US multinational tech company could feasibly get together with Microsoft, Google and Cisco and effectively cut Greece’s debt problem to a more manageable rate.
Greece is heading for a crisis and has warned that it will run out of cash in just two weeks.
The country could offer the big tech companies a sweetheart tax deal where they would pay a much reduced corporate tax.
Webcertain’s global marketing news bulletins are daily 5-minute videos, providing marketers with the latest international digital marketing news in an easy-to-digest format.
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