Media and entertainment industry soars on the Internet (3)

Shen appears to be right based on the fact that five leading industries in terms of advertisement investment, including daily cosmetics, food and pharmaceuticals, have seen their budgets shrink. All the advertisers should make full use of every penny of investment at a time of economic slowdown, especially when daily necessity giants such as Procter and Gamble have seen their advertisement investments cut.

"Return on investment is a top priority. With effective integration of screens, brands will still be able to increase their recognition despite tighter budgets," said Tan Beiping, Greater China research and development director at Millward Brown.

There were at least 200 million smartphones in use in China last year, among which 60 million ran on Apple's iOS. The remainder were Android devices. It means that it only took one year for one-third of the 700 million Chinese mobile phone users to go "smart". It is predicted the number of mobile terminals will overtake that of personal computers by the end of 2013 or in early 2014.

"The number of mobile users in China is not as many (per capita) as that in Western countries, which means there is more room to expand the market in the country to get more people into the 'smart' world," said McGregor.

Shan Xiaolei, vice-president and general manager of the multi-terminal business department at PPTV Online TV, said: "The good thing is the mobile phone is good company, something that spends two-thirds of a day with you. Media that accompany people are more valuable to advertisers."

Video clips are now the best seller thanks to the prevalence of screens. According to statistics collected by the advertisement-monitoring platform of the third-party advertising technology company Miaozhen Systems in China, almost 60 percent of advertisement placements included online videos among all the 122 monitored brands from January to July, 30 percent of which resorted to online videos only.

"The budget for video advertisements for this year should include TV, reputation-building media, Internet video and everything related to video," said Chen Yan, chief strategy officer at Focus Media.