From a Papua New Guinea perspective, the most striking thing about attending Australia’s major annual media and marketing conference last week was the irrelevance of so much of the content, writes Robert Hamilton-Jones.

Business Advantage International’s Robert Hamilton-Jones

The several hundred delegates attending the Mumbrella360 talk-fest in Sydney, Australia, were informed and inspired by luminaries such as Simon McDowell, the Chief Marketing Officer of Coles, Channel 9 supremo David Gyngell and Melissa Barnes, global head of brand and agency advocacy for Twitter.

The following topics typified the event’s agenda:

• How can companies get a return on the investment they make in social media, rather than just going through the motions?
• What is all the fuss about content marketing?
• Once you’ve got your hands on Big Data, just how do you use it to communicate more effectively with your customers?

These aren’t big topics in PNG. Many of even the largest companies operating in PNG currently have only the most cursory online presence, let alone have embraced Web 2.0. The country, and the Pacific more widely, has so far been been relatively untouched by the technology-driven revolution that has occurred in global media, marketing and communications over the past 15 or so years.

‘In an under-serviced and rapidly-growing economy, companies have not needed to innovate’

Why? A major reason is that most of their customers have not had access to technology such as smartphones and fast internet upon which the new digital marketing tools depend.

Another reason is that, in an under-serviced and rapidly-growing economy, companies (with a handful of notable exceptions) have not needed to innovate. If our profits are already sky-high, why not keep doing things the way we were in 2003?

These two photos taken just eight years apart at the announcements of the two most recent Popes was used by Twitter’s Melissa Barnes to illustrate how quickly the world has embraced the mobile digital age. Credit: Luca Bruno/AP, Michael Sohn/AP

This is about to change.

Against the backdrop of a cooling domestic economy, the National Transmission Network will bring broadband to a much greater portion of PNG’s population. Meanwhile, Digicel has begun aggressively marketing Android-enabled smartphones to PNG’s mass-market—a strategy likely to be mirrored by Bemobile once Vodafone is fully-established as its management company.

This new landscape will provide a much greater incentive for PNG businesses to embrace new technologies, not just to reduce costs and improve the experience of customers, but also to acquire and retain new customers.

But it will also bring risks: larger players who currently enjoy significant market share in their sector could potentially find themselves out-manoeuvred by smaller competitors who prove themselves quicker on the uptake.

Robert Hamilton-Jones is Commercial Director at Business Advantage International