Small Market, Big Audience?
Singapore is a small market with extremely high digital penetration. This fact is the clue that Singaporean companies need to solve in their video marketing strategies. With video’s position as the most consumed media and its growing popularity across every social platform, there is opportunity for companies to create engaged customers and differentiate their brand.
The hard truth is that with the big screen’s decline and TV viewership dwindling, it just doesn’t make much sense for most companies to spend big on just one video. Recency and relevancy is key in the social era, hence every dollar spent needs to be optimized to segmented target audiences. This means delivery of a stream of video content specifically for millennials between the ages of 30-35, and also separate content for Gen Z aged 20-25.
The big golden TV ad is still effective for dominant market leaders with big production budgets and even bigger distribution budgets. We’re talking a video campaign budget of 7 figures or more. Their success is achieved by capital scale, where they are able to show the same content over and over again, even in the most unoptimised platform. This could mean a landscape video with no initial hooks meant for TV being uploaded as a YouTube and Instagram video ad. With poor optimisation comes poor results at the expense of cost.
So what should marketing directors and CEOs consider? At Chowder, our opinion is that the future of video marketing will live and breathe on the viewer’s phone as evidenced by data. The blessing is the phone’s ubiquity and how companies can reach their target audiences almost directly. However, the curse is in its noise. Too much content out in the world to consume and people are spoiled for choice. Hence, quality content that is relevant to your target audience at scale is what really matters. The results speak for themselves. Personally at Chowder, we’ve seen an almost 600% increase in one of our client’s engagement rates the moment we optimized their video podcast for YouTube.
In the Singaporean market, mobile-first video marketing grew from $29.7M USD in 2017 to over $162M USD in 2023(Statista). An over 400% increase. While at the same time, short form video ads continue to gain market share at the expense of all other formats of video advertising, from 2% market share in 2017, to 40% in 2023(Statista).
The data tells us that the market has begun its shift towards short-form, mobile first content. The dominance of the short-form defined as any video under 60 seconds, across TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts and LinkedIn’s 2024 push for short-form content, is further proof that the short form era is upon us.
In essence, companies that want to stay relevant to consumers in both B2B and B2C spheres have to acknowledge that video and in particular short-form video, is king. To not create video content in this age is to let attention of your brand slip by. And in the modern attention economy, where in 2023 an average of $18.9 USD was spent on video advertising per internet user, the market has begun its understanding that creating engaged customers through content is an essential part of business.
Companies that wish to succeed in Singapore have to win in the digital space. Beyond video production, the ultimate goal is to be able to produce quality content that is relevant, recent and at scale. With that, not only is more brand awareness generated, but trust is built and that further unlocks a competitive advantage of pricing power.
