Global Marketing News – 8th July 2016
Snapchat clone Snow takes off in Asia
A picture messaging app in South Korea, which bears a striking similarity to Snapchat, has taken off all around Asia.
With filters, self-deleting image messaging and a function to store videos as ‘stories’, the Snapchat clone, called Snow, is proving how social messaging giants face a struggle to grow in fast-growing Asian countries.
With around 30 million downloads since its introduction in September, Snow is now growing in China where Snapchat is banned.
According to Han Dong-keun, a spokesman for its parent company Naver, Snow is looking to make the most of China’s 700 million user internet market.
Mr. Chae, a venture capital investor, has said that Korean founders no longer target the US market, where they often fail, but are now targeting the growing Chinese market that “seems to be more welcoming for Korean technology and culture than the Western world ever was”.
Ireland saw biggest digital growth in Europe over last decade
According to a new study from AdEx and IAB Europe, Ireland has had the largest digital growth in Europe over the last 10 years, followed by Bulgaria, Poland and Slovenia.
The report as a whole looked comprehensively into the continent’s online advertising spend, which culminated in a value of 36.4 billion Euros in 2015, showing a year-on-year increase of 13%.
Townsend Feehan, CEO of IAB Europe, said that the report showed a “huge milestone for the European digital advertising industry” as it overtook TV spend, which was part of a decline of 4.1% registered by other media over the same period.
The author of the research, Daniel Knapp, added that “online advertising continued to grow in double-digits despite its maturity”, whilst the “AdEx Benchmark report reveals that the main drivers across Europe are video, mobile, and programmatic”.
Middle East saw 23% increase in online payments in 2015
The online payment service Ayfort has revealed in its State of Payments in the Arab World report that the region saw a 23% increase in online payments during 2015.
The positive result, led by high growth in both Saudi Arabia and the UAE, also shows that online payments across the Middle-East could grow by around 300% before 2020, resulting in 69 billion US dollars of transactions every year.
The information, from the seven markets it operates in (Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE), also shows that just over half of shoppers across the region prefer cash-on-delivery and 90% checked online reviews, but only 17% said their entire journey took place online.
This includes revealing the high growth levels in online transactions in the airline and travel sector across the region.
Yandex defends itself in “right to be forgotten” case
Yandex has begun its defence in legal proceedings brought by a Russian billionaire, whose information it refused to delete from its search results.
The case follows Yevgeny Prigozhin’s attempts to have Yandex delete links to information allegedly concerning his past as an ex-convict and investigations into one of his businesses.
The Kuibyshevsky District Court in St. Petersburg began hearing lawsuits filed by Prigozhin on Tuesday, where Yandex will defend their decision not to remove links even though laws were introduced this year in Russia that allow for ‘irrelevant’ pages to be removed about someone’s past.
At the same time as he filed the request with Yandex, Yevgeny Prigozhin also filed similar requests with Google and Mail.ru, who also both refused.
Naver to make South Korea Winter Olympics more foreigner-friendly
And finally, with the 2018 Winter Olympic Games due to be held in South Korea, the country is trying to increase services for foreign visitors.
After Brazil announced a similar initiative using Google Maps for the 2016 summer games, South Korea will use local services such as Naver Maps to help foreign-language visitors.
Hoping to provide useful services to the expected 50,000 people at the games, and 5 million tourists around the country at that time, it is also hoped that the Pyeongchang Games could assist Naver’s global expansion.
Naver also said that it would employ foreign students in Korea, to make sure the services were suitable for people visiting the country.
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