Rise in Mobile Pushes Rise in Global Ad Spending

The United States accounts for 5% of the world’s population but 34% of total worldwide advertising. That means we’re the largest ad market but it doesn’t mean we’re the only market. According to a new study by Ad Age, China is one of the fastest growing countries in regard to advertising dollars. With 20% of the world’s population, they currently account for only 5% of the worldwide ad budget but experts say they’re on track to displace Germany as the third largest market come 2011. Sitting in the number two spot? Japan and they’re likely to stay that way.

What’s being advertised globally? Personal care items and automobiles took the top two spots followed by food, drugs and entertainment. When it comes to drugs and entertainment products, more than half of all ad dollars are being spent in the US as compared to the other categories that are only 20 – 30% US heavy.

When it comes to trends in advertising, expecting the rest of the world to respond as American’s do would be a mistake. AdAge says that newspapers on on the rise in Asia, Africa and Latin America which is totally contrary to newspaper sales here and in Europe. And while mobile is big everywhere, it’s key in countries such as China, Brazil and India where phone service is cheaper than internet service. This same trend will drive users toward ebooks and tablets. Cyber cafes continue to flourish in countries such as South Korea and Brazil – perfect places to sell gaming pre-paid cards and social media driven products.

Where we are alike is in TV consumption. Everyone is watching TV, even poor households have to have one these days. The average person the world over is watching more than three hours of TV a day and much of that is sports, reality competition shows like American Idol and soaps (which are much bigger in Latin America than they are now in the US.)

To learn more about trends in global advertising, check out AdAge’s “10 Trends That Are Shaping Global Media Consumption” or purchase the full white paper, Global Media Habits 2010, by Greg Lindsay, at AdAge.com.

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It Pays To Know People in High Facebook Places

Elevation Partners is most known for one of its investors, U2’s Bono, and it’s big time play with Palm. Now, the first one is good for the headlines but the second one, not so much. It appears as if Elevation is getting beyond its recent history as it invests $120 million in Facebook in the secondary market. This signals a change in the company and also could be a sign of the much vaunted Facebook IPO being a thing of the more distant future than many would like. TechCrunch reports

Elevation’s premature obituary is a popular story these days. Things haven’t worked out as planned for the firm—at all— but that’s not unique in the venture market these days, and the tide is turning for Elevation. The Palm-albatross is gone, and the firm didn’t lose money on the deal—not a trivial milestone considering it was 20% of the fund.

This turning tide is helping Facebook for sure. It’s interesting to see how these how these high dollar ‘investments’ take place because it appears as if you may need to know some people in some high places.

Facebook controls who buys its shares on the secondary market, and Elevation has tight ties with the company. Elevation founders Roger McNamee and Bono were personal investors in Facebook, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s brother-in-law is Mark Bodnick, another Elevation partner. This isn’t an accidental tie-up.

So even while Ms. Sandberg is proclaiming the end of e-mail she can at least give some reasonable advice to family members.

So what does this mean for the rest of us? Not much really unless you are thinking you have an inside track to any IPO upside for Facebook. If the company can keep generating revenue that has been rumored to be anywhere from $800 million to $1.3 billion recently and get chunks of investment like this there is not going to be a great rush to go IPO and lose much of the autonomy it currently has. Heck, if you did that you may have to put together policies that actually make sense!

It looks like for the foreseeable future Facebook is going to be sticking with things it can control like who gets to ‘buy-in’ on the secondary market. While this may be a discouraging thing to all of those Facebook employees looking for the IPO mother lode it’s very encouraging to those at the top of the Facebook food chain.

Now they only have to worry about the government dictating how they do business. Why introduce the rest of the world to the same possibility?

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