MediaCorp vs SPH – Giants, Prepare For The Next Lap

Jump to Comments

In a little moment of clarity in our swirling media, I gazed at the alignment of stars this week and I saw a war a-comin’. The armies are gathering forces and the next battle will be fought in the trenches of the classifieds.

OK, it’s not glamorous advertising, there’ll be no award shows or high budget photo-shoot junkets for agencies in Mauritius, but media owners have spotted the opportunity and they’re jockeying for position.

“Wow, he’s an acute trend watcher”, I hear you thinking. And, I’d like to take credit for studying the trends. But actually in this case I just sat there and they phoned themselves in. Literally.

It’s Not A Race Without A Long Shot

Yesterday I had a call from JobsDB, one of our regional online-job-ad leaders. That in itself is not uncommon. If I’d signed up with the number of investment advisors who’ve called me at work in the past year I might be a rich man. Well, as long as I resist the temptation to buy all the photocopiers I get offered each week, with all the credit cards I seem to qualify for.

But in this case JobsDB was quick to assure me that they weren’t calling as JobsDB, they were calling as 88DB.com and they wanted to offer me a free listing. In fact, they’d already gone as far as doing all the work and writing it for me, based on our company website, and all I had to do was say yes. Free, they assured me. So of course I said yes, and within 10 minutes I had a confirmation email with a “click to activate” button.

Straits Times – A Slow Start, But Excellent Legs

Strangely, this was the same day I read a big feature in The Straits Times about the expansion of ST701, which stands for Straits Times and something clever like 7 days a week one portal, from being a jobs-based site to including cars, property, shops and everything else classified.

The Straits Times, writing glowing commentary about themselves, feels that their newspaper classifieds are “synonymous with efficiency, quality customer service, reliability and effectiveness” and this will rub off on their online version. All I really think of when I think of them is how a 7cm recruitment ad costs me nearly $1000, but perhaps other people think of them in more glowing ways.

Of course the dice are loaded in their favour. Not only have they got great traffic coming through the ST site, the AsiaOne site, and now their community portal Stomp, but they’ve also set aside $10 million to invest in their online properties, with more money to follow. Competition? Just club it with that big fat heavy cheque book!

MediaCorp – An Early Lead And A Lovely Set Of Matching Pipes

These things take quite a while to plan and develop, so the ST expansion is probably not a direct reaction to the recent launch of local classifieds site Mocca, owned by our free-to-air television monopoly MediaCorp, but Mocca did beat them both to the punch. And Mocca has TV (and some very cute and viral tv ads here, here and here) behind it.

So, if we discount JobsDB whose main media seems to be bus and taxi advertising, it seems to be a repeat of the free tabloid newspaper battle we had a couple of years ago. Once again our giant television monopoly squares up with our giant newspaper monopoly for a head-to-head battle. Catchy TV spots during Star Search would seem to be the way to a heartlander’s heart, but then SPH cleverly laid the groundwork online with Stomp some time ago, and it’ll be a true test of whether TV really is losing its power to the internet.

And The Winner Is?

In the end of course, the rich will get richer. The experts at Hitwise say that while classified websites account for only 0.2 percent of internet visits in Singapore, it’s around 1.1 percent in the US, so we have a lot of room to grow. Of course it doesn’t take 25 minutes to get from one side of the US to the other, as it does in Singapore, so we’ll have to wait and see if we need classified advertising as much as they do. But we all know that it costs $500 to fly spitting distance to KL because they won’t open the skies, while for the same price we can get to Bali and back twice, because there’s plenty of competition. So, the more the merrier, and the winner is probably us.

Pic by CreativeSpark

6 Comments

Filed under Advertising & Branding, Singapore, Web & Technology

Tags: 88DB, classified advertising, JobsDB, MediaCorp, SPH, Straits Times