Busting the blockers

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The creation in 2014 of a ‘mobile- friendly sidewalk’ – a 30m lane intended exclusively for people using their phones while walking – in the Chinese city of Chongqing was just one sign of the emergence of Asia’s mobile-first generation. For this cohort, primarily in their teens and twenties, the smartphone is their primary screen – seemingly upstaging the real world even when they’re on the move.  

This emergence of mobile has been reflected in the – albeit modestly – growing proportion of Asian marketing budgets being apportioned to mobile marketing. According to a Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) and Warc report, the number of marketers assigning more than 10% of their budgets to mobile rose from one in five in 2013 to one in three in 2015, while the share of advertisers spending more than a quarter of their budget on mobile rose from 5% in 2014 to 8% in 2015. Mobile budgets are expected to double by ...