Yahoo! It’s the Philippines

The eyeballs have shifted online.” Those are the words of Jojo Anonuevo, general manager of Yahoo Philippines, when describing how the Filipino consumers’ attention is moving away from traditional media and towards the Internet.

Yahoo is embracing this shift by launching its new integrated advertising platform in the Philippines, giving local businesses an online option for advertising. This service includes “sponsored search,” which will only display advertisements that are relevant to the consumer’s search results.

For example, if I type in the words “party supplies,” Yahoo sponsored search allows a party supplies business to place an advertisement along with the search the results. This enables businesses to target only a specific and relevant audience and allows consumers to only see advertisements that they may find helpful. It makes is easier for customers to find sellers and vice versa.

The reason why Yahoo is in position to pull this off locally better than anyone in the industry (Google, Microsoft, etc.) is that it has an incredible hold on Filipino consumers. “1 in 4 Filipinos are online,” Anonuevo says. “Eighty-five percent of them are using Yahoo.” With a little number crunching, that’s over 19 million people who access Yahoo on a regular basis.

That astonishing number is the product of Yahoo being the starting point for most Pinoys who open their web browsers. Most of us have Yahoo as our homepage and default search engine, most of us have Yahoo e-mail accounts and Yahoo Messenger is our IM client of choice. Our online journey usually begins with Yahoo.

This gives the opportunity to businesses, small and big alike, to reach this large audience and be able to specifically target the segments they wish to address. To compare, a primetime advertisement slot on local TV will cost hundreds of thousands of pesos and will reach people in the tens of millions. Of that number, only a very small fraction will actually care about your product. With online advertising, you could probably reach the same number of people at a significantly lesser price.

For potential customers, such as myself, this service suddenly transforms online advertisements from being irrelevant and annoying to something that is significant and worthwhile. The next time I search for something like “flower delivery,” I won’t get advertisements that tell me I can deliver flowers from New York to Wyoming. Instead, I can get ads that tell me I can have my flowers delivered from Paranaque to Quezon City.

Filipino casual users and embracers of the Internet alike should look forward the launch of this new advertising platform, which is penciled in sometime in the second quarter of this year. The Internet is quickly becoming the medium of choice for a growing number of people, the youth especially. Having localized search and online display advertising is a significant step toward having a vibrant and organic Filipino Internet landscape.   

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For questions, comments or corrections please e-mail me at carlfrancisramirez@gmail.com.