62% of Asia-Pac's CMOs invested over a quarter of budget in digital marketing

Versus global figure of only 47%.

According to the global research by Accenture, marketing budgets are expected to grow significantly next year and CMOs in APAC have already aggressively allocated budgets to digital marketing – a sign that they believe that digital is critical to their future.

44 percent of APAC marketers are confident that their marketing budget will grow significantly – an increase of nine points from 2011. In Asia Pacific, 62 percent of CMOs have allocated over a quarter of their marketing budget to digital marketing this year compared to the global figure of 47 percent.

The research also noted that 84 percent of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in Asia Pacific feel well-prepared to meet their marketing objectives with the right people, tools and resources, which is higher than the global average of around 60 percent.

Accenture Interactive’s latest report, Turbulence for the CMO, surveyed more than 400 senior marketing executives across 10 countries including Singapore, China and Australia.

CMOs in APAC rely heavily on external partners to support the explosion of channels. The results showed that between 41 percent and 76 percent of marketing activities are managed by external agencies to execute their marketing initiatives, which creates an extremely fragmented environment.

CMOs in APAC are at an overall level satisfied with their agencies. When it comes to managing the marketing budget, CMOs in APAC are more satisfied (23% higher than the global average) with the performance of partner agencies in managing marketing budget. They also have much higher levels of satisfaction with agencies’ abilities to provide an integrated view of marketing effectiveness and business processes around briefs and decision making.

The study indicated that partners and agencies have to continue to help CMOs make sense of the complexity in the market place by improving their levels of execution and delivery and by providing a broader set of capabilities and deeper integration across the agency ecosystem.